


Supernova

by Yossk



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Natasha-centric, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-11-11
Packaged: 2019-01-25 12:48:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12531756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yossk/pseuds/Yossk
Summary: Natasha comes to with a pounding headache and a familiar sick feeling in her gut that tells her that whatever she was doing before she wound up lying on a cold concrete floor with every muscle aching and a throbbing pain in her right thigh, it did not go entirely to plan.AKA Natasha gets herself into a whole load of trouble, and then gets herself out again.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning: This story contains several scenes with graphic descriptions of torture and violence. Please proceed with caution. If you would like further details or clarification, please skip to the end-notes in the last chapter.** (This story is complete and a chapter will be posted every few days, so the end notes will be available within the next two weeks or so. If you would like details before then, please don't hesitate to contact me.)
> 
> **Other notes:**  
>  I need to give a big thank you to my wonderful partner for reading this over, actually enjoying it and pointing out that Clint would never say 'chuffed'. On a related note, please let me know if any other Britishisms have slipped through the net... (Not counting different spellings - I know I have extra 'u's scattered here, there and everywhere!)
> 
> All mistakes are mine, and all characters belong to Marvel and Disney. I am just playing with them for a while.
> 
> I love Natasha, and I hope I have done her justice here.

_Two weeks ago, Avenger’s HQ_

“We used to steal cake from Мистер Kuznetsov’s sweet shop.” Wanda’s eyes sparkle a little in the early evening sun. Steve, lounging on the couch opposite, pretends to look shocked. She sticks her tongue out at him.

“He caught us, one time, and chased us out. We were only small, but we knew all the streets and alleyways and we got away. But of course, he knew where we lived and soon he was banging at the front door, shouting at us to come out. Which we did.” Wanda shrugs, “And we cried, and said we were sorry, and gave him back his box of terrible chocolate. But he didn’t know that whilst he’d been watching Pietro, I had taken…I don’t think I know the English word, it is a cake with honey and spices…” She trails off a little, looks around expectantly.

“Something like gingerbread?” The suggestion comes from Rhodey, spread out on the floor where he had been lazily paging through a magazine before the others had arrived.

“Yes.” She nods slowly, “Yes I think that is it! It was the best cake we had ever tasted! I don’t think anything will ever beat it…” A low murmur of laughter passes around the room; her joy is infectious. She shuts her eyes for a second, taking herself back to that moment: the taste of gingerbread on her tongue, the sharp smell of it all around her, and her brother’s laughing in her ears.

When she opens them again the conversation has moved on; Sam is regaling the room with his own tale of childhood derring-do from a perch on the arm of the blue couch opposite her. The sun at his back forces Wanda to squint to look at him, and so her eyes slide over to catch Natasha’s. She has finally looked up from the laptop screen which has been engrossing her all evening and is watching Wanda instead. There’s a question in the crease of her eyebrows: _‘You ok?’_ Wanda dips her chin a fraction: _‘Yes’_. The hole in her heart will still be there whether she talks about him or not, and remembering is so much better than trying to forget.

Steve has followed her gaze, and as Sam finishes his tale, he scrambles to his feet and moves over to Natasha’s table. 

He sits down opposite her and snaps the laptop screen shut. She gives him an _‘I could kill you with my pinkie if I wanted to’_ look. “Come on Nat, you’re missing all the fun. I think that was the best inflatable duck story we’re ever going to hear.” Sam throws a cushion at his head.

She rolls her eyes at him, “That’s debatable. You should hear some of Clint’s.” He raises an eyebrow at her. “I was in the middle of something.”

“Yes, and unless I am very much mistaken, it was that report for Maria I said I’d do in the morning.”

He’s tempted to hustle her bodily onto a couch, but the last time he tried that it ended in a fairly violent sparring match and they broke the coffee table. And anyway, Tony’s joined in the effort now from his seat in the largest squishy armchair in the corner. Despite his claim to have retired, he has an uncanny knack of turning up every time there’s free pizza. 

“Better hurry up Romanoff, I think Wanda’s drowning in all the testosterone over here.” The look of disgust on Wanda’s face, as well as the raised eyebrow from Steve is enough for her to decide to let them win. This time. She was just finishing up anyway.

“Fine. You guys had better not have eaten all the pizza.” 

Steve’s grin is infectious.

A few minutes later Natasha’s curled up like a cat at the other end of Steve’s couch as he tells his five hundredth ‘what Bucky and I used to get up to in Brooklyn’ story. This one has a stray gerbil in it. She’s pretty sure she’s heard it before, but she’s not really listening. She pours herself a glass of red wine, and realises belatedly that she’s sat down far out of reach of any of the remaining pizza, but can’t quite summon the motivation to get up again. Wanda is laughing. Good. It’s taken a long while, but this newest bunch of misfits is finally starting to feel like a team. It’s not the same as it was before, and Natasha’s not sure she’ll ever get used to feeling like her and Steve have adopted four wayward and extremely dangerous children, but maybe it’ll be as good, in its own way.

After a few minutes, she looks up and catches Tony grinning at her from his armchair in the corner. She’s not entirely sure what he’s found so amusing this time, but she rolls her eyes at him anyway. 

“So how about you Natasha?” 

“Huh?”

She’s tuned back into the conversation at the sound of her name, but can’t quite compute what Rhodey’s asking.

“Come on, Nat, you gotta have something good.” Her stomach twists a little as she makes the connection. Tony’ eyebrows, which are frantically trying to telegraph a message to the back of his best friend’s head, only confirm her suspicions. Rhodey’s grinning with mischief, oblivious to Tony’s theatrics behind him, and Steve shifts uncomfortably at the other end of the sofa.

She’s incredibly tempted to make something up. At least six just-scandalous-enough yarns she’s spun undercover spring to mind immediately, and there’s a few more she could tweak a little. They dance tantalisingly on the tip of her tongue.

And yet.

This team, the trust just beginning to form between them, it’s new and fragile and Rhodey doesn’t deserve to be lied to. It’d hurt more than she’d expected to find out the Fury didn’t trust her. So, new leaf, or something like it. 

She’s raises one eyebrow at Rhodey, tone light, “You really don’t want to know.”

Rhodey looks like he’s about to protest, but Tony interrupts, setting down his beer bottle with a sharp thunk, “Hey, I haven’t had my turn yet. Did I ever tell you about the time I built my first nuclear reactor..?”

Rhodey groans “Yeah, I think you just might. And you don’t count, didn’t you retire or something?”

“No, no” Natasha jumps in, “Active non-combatant I think he said. But maybe come up with something else – I think we’ll all die a little inside if we have to sit through that one again.” She gives him a half-smile that’s mostly sarcasm, but just a little bit thanks.

“Aw, damn it, that’s a great story. What about the time I tried to build a black hole in the microwave?”

Rhodey’s voice is thick with sarcasm, “What, the time you nearly succeeded, or the time you just scared the shit out of the family cat?” 

“The former?”

“Heard it.”

“The latter?

“Yep, surprisingly, also heard it.”

“Damn it.”

“Hey, has anyone got any pizza left?” Steve interjects, as he stands up and starts scrambling around through the boxes. Sam gets up to help, whilst Rhodey and Tony continue to bicker across the room.

“Hey, Steve” Natasha calls.

His head pops up from down the side of the couch “Yup?”

“You find any? I’m starving.”

He looks sorrowful “Nope. But despair not, there’s still another….six boxes.”

She joins Steve in his pizza hunt and wishes the wine was vodka.

  


***

  


_Now, God knows where_

Natasha comes to with a pounding headache and a familiar sick feeling in her gut that tells her that whatever she was doing before she wound up lying on a cold concrete floor with every muscle aching and a throbbing pain in her right thigh, it did not go entirely to plan. Her brain is foggy and thinking feels like wading through treacle. She resists the temptation to groan and keeps her eyelids still. She has little to no clue where she is, or who might be watching, and she’d quite like to find out before she decides whether or not to let them know she’s awake.

She strains to listen, feeling with four senses for another human presence. She hears footsteps and a door swinging a few rooms away, smells damp and a faint waft of manure, but no soft breaths, no tang of human sweat. She’s alone. 

She turns her focus inwards now, checking off limbs and vital systems like preparing an aircraft for launch. Head – aching, but intact. Internal organs – fine, she thinks. Ribs – bruised, but nothing broken. Left leg – fine. Right leg - Her heart sinks as she remembers the white hot pain of being grazed by a bullet. But she can’t feel the sticky wetness of blood seeping down her leg. Curious. She shifts it ever so slightly, and meets the familiar tug of roughly made stitches. The discovery would be a lot more comforting if she couldn’t also feel cold steel handcuffs around her wrists, and a chain digging into her hip which will prevent her using them as a free garrotte. 

Feet – shackled together, and she’s not wearing any shoes. Guns – gone. Widow’s bites – gone. Knives – also gone. Comms – fat chance. Any tech she had hidden on her person that could possibly be useful – guess what, also gone. 

_This isn’t looking good, Romanoff._

The entire process takes less than thirty seconds, by which time her memories of the last few days have untangled themselves from the fog and brought with them the knowledge of whose hospitality she is currently enjoying. Her blood runs a little colder and she recognises the knot in her stomach as the cold ball of rage which has been burning there for the past week. She struggles to remember her last communication with the rest of the team – did they complete the mission? She wracks her memory. She recalls the sound of Steve yelling at her to hurry up. Were they ready to leave? Did they go without her? They better have. If Steve jeopardised the mission in a fit of chivalry she has a slow and painful death reserved for him. A gnawing worry joins the rage-ball in her stomach, but she pushes it out of her mind. Something to be dealt with later.

Having decided that there’s nothing more to be gained from feigning unconsciousness, she lets her eyelids flutter open and lethargically struggles to sit up. She’s completely alert now, adrenaline flooding her system and readying her body for a fight, but Natasha is a master at faking weakness. Let them think she’s still wading through treacle. She lets out a small, involuntary-looking gasp and clutches her ribs as she moves, lets the colour drain from her face as she takes in her surroundings and uselessly tugs at her bonds. She’s already considered the relative merits and drawbacks of dislocating both her thumbs to liberate her wrists but the cuffs are tight, and she’d lay odds on ending up in a lot of pain for no benefit. Still, she’ll try it if things get really desperate.

The cell is bare, no cameras in sight. A flickering fluorescent fitting in the ceiling offers a weak yellow glow, and a small barred opening in the wall behind her lets sunlight stream in. She studies the silhouette it casts, lines it up in reference to imperfections in the concrete. She’ll have to wait a few hours, but then at least she’ll be able to work out the time of the day and the direction she’s facing.

She waits impatiently, mind working through plans and objectives, prioritising and re-evaluating based on current circumstances. She’s debating whether or not to start making a lot of noise and speed up proceedings when she hears the beat of two pairs of boots walking down the corridor and stopping outside the door. She smiles to herself. The distinctive beep of an electronic lock follows. Finger-print controlled, most likely, to match the one inside the door. She files that information away for later.

Two people enter. One is male, tall and well-built. Neatly groomed and projecting an air of confident superiority. He is also extremely bad at hiding his anger, and the sight makes Natasha’s heart sing just a little bit. The other is large and, surprisingly, female, her hair scraped and pinned back on her head. Natasha allows her body to shrink in on itself, and her breathing to become deliberate and shallow. The man (she’s going to call him Franz), leans nonchalantly against the wall opposite her as the woman (Ange, she thinks) firmly shuts the door.

“So.” His voice is harsh. “Ms Romanova.” She flinches slightly at the use of her real name. Why is it that the only people who haven’t read her file are the only ones she actually wants to have done? “I have a simple proposition for you. Your friends have taken something which is mine. I want you to tell me where they have gone.”

A little knot of tension relaxes at his words, but it doesn’t reach her face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she spits out, aiming for badly concealed fear. Franz nods at Ange and the sharp kick to the ribs is almost instantaneous. She exaggerates her gasp of pain, telegraphing fractured ribs, and doesn’t fight back; she’s waiting for her opportunity.

Franz sighs melodramatically, “I was rather afraid you’d say that. But no matter, we have a lot of ways to jog your memory.” 

There’s a little part of Natasha (the part that has Clint’s voice) that has to supress her laughter – he sounds like he’s been consulting _‘how to intimidate a prisoner 101’_. But she keeps it to herself because Ange has grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to her feet and it’s the sliver of opportunity she’s been waiting for. She braces her elbows against the wall, momentarily lamenting Ange’s lack of external sexual organs, before twisting her body and swinging her feet up to land a powerful kick in her stomach. Ange lets go of her hair in surprise and they both fall to the floor, Natasha landing awkwardly and painfully on her hip. 

She lands another kick to Ange’s knees and a head-butt to her gut before the inevitable explosion of pain as Ange’s boot drives her cuffed hands deep into her stomach. She moves quickly, coughing and gasping, twisting out of reach and rolling to her feet behind the other woman to land a sharp elbow in the small of her back. Ange staggers, and turns around, snarling, hurling a heavy fist at Natasha’s head. She ducks, rolls away again, attempts to use the momentum to get to her feet once more, but her bruised abdominal muscles don’t comply quickly enough and she stumbles, colliding hard with the concrete wall. 

Ange is on her in a second. She’s imprecise, but she’s quick and strong and has use of all four limbs. A firm kick lands in the small of her back, and another in her stomach forces the air from her lungs. She gasps for breath and feels her vision waver as her head is knocked sharply against the wall. Franz has started to chuckle and she spits in his general direction. It’s immature but satisfying.

“Tell me where they are.” He demands, as Ange kicks her hard in the side and she hears the unmistakable _crack_ of a rib breaking for real.

She smirks at him, “Far away, where you will never, ever find them.” 

Franz directs his next words at Ange, “Make her sing.” Natasha snorts as he leaves the room, shutting the door firmly behind him. She looks down at her silently, a cartoonishly cruel grin spreading across her face.

Natasha forces herself to sit up, “Just us girls then. What do you fancy? Slumber party? S’mores? Spin the bottle?” Ange grabs her by the hair again, and throws her against the opposite wall. She narrowly avoids cracking her head against it, twisting at the last minute and causing her ribs to scream in pain. But she pushes it out of her mind. _It doesn’t matter._

“Not spin the bottle then. Truth or dare?” This earns her another slam against the wall.

The blows keeps coming. Ange doesn’t know where and how to hit to cause the most pain, but she’s strong and brutal and the balance of probabilities dictate that she sometimes gets lucky. 

Natasha shuts her eyes, swears quietly to herself. She’s missed this opportunity, but there’ll be others. She retreats to a place in her mind which is warm and safe and home. She drinks hot chocolate and helps Cooper and Lila build a quinjet from Lego.

  


***

  


_Two weeks ago, Avengers HQ_

Later, after it all quietens down and the lights have been dimmed and the furious argument about which film to put on has been settled, Natasha slips out and pads silently down the corridors to the emergency stairs which lead to the roof. With Maria’s help, they’ve employed some analysts and admin staff and technical support, but the Avengers are the only ones who actually live at HQ and so, at this time of night when the world isn’t falling down around their ears, the building is quiet and the complex is dark and the stars are quite breath-taking. 

She leans on the railing, and as she lets her eyes adjust to the darkness she can pick out the empty fields and dark woodland that surrounds them. The nearest household is a large converted barn about two miles away, and if she squints she can just about make out the flicker of a television and the glow of lights in the upstairs windows. She wonders how the occupants of that house would feel if they knew just how often she comes up here to watch them going about their lives. She’s quite glad they don’t. 

She misses Clint at times like this, misses having someone who knows the very core of her. She picked up her rooftop habit from him, and no-one else seem to understand the appeal. It’s taking yourself out of the noise of the small details, and being somewhere where you can see the whole picture. It’s peaceful. And sometimes (she doesn’t admit this to herself often) it’s like she can draw a line from herself, up here on the roof of a warehouse in up-state New York, to a farm in the middle of Iowa and a family that she likes to think of as her own. 

The lights in the barn across the way start to flick off, turning the lonely homestead into a dramatic silhouette. Natasha turns her gaze up towards the sky. It’s a new moon so the stars are the only lights for miles and she can make out faint trails of the milky-way. She wonders about it sometimes – what else is out there? She laughs at herself. Not so long ago, she’d have started to seriously question her sanity, but after Norse gods from Asgard, and Chitauri battle fleets, she can’t help but be curious. She knows it terrifies Tony – she pulled him out here with her once, and he wouldn’t look at them. Couldn’t see the beauty, only the pain and death and war. And she can’t say she blames him, but the way Natasha figures it – life out there can’t be so different from life on Earth. Good guys and bad guys and everyone in between. She’s still not sure where she fits.

The temperature’s dropping, and she pulls her jacket tighter around her shoulders. Most people presume she’s impervious to cold – a Russian stereotype she’s never really been able to figure out. The reality is that she detests the cold, has seen too much of it and hates the way it gets into her bones and makes her limbs disobey her. She’s been in too many situations where loss of control is near-certain death, and she’d honestly be happy to never see another snowflake in her life. 

The sound of footsteps making their way up the stairs enters her consciousness. Military precision, but without the slight bounce in Steve’s gait, or the lightness of Sam’s. _Rhodey_. The door opens with a creak and then clicks shut. She doesn’t turn around. He walks over and leans against the railing next to her. She waits for him to speak first.

“Hi.”

“Did you get bored of watching people with dreadful aim shoot at each other?” 

He laughs, “Yeah, a little. It’s only funny for so long before you start wanting to show them how it’s done.”

Natasha gives him a wry smile and turns back to the landscape. She’s pretty sure he didn’t come up here to give her his opinion on terrible action movies, but she decides to wait him out. It doesn’t take long – Rhodey doesn’t do deep conversations very often, but he’s no coward either.

“So, uh, I talked to Tony.”

“Did you now?” She’s not trying to be cruel, to make him spell it out, but it’s easier than doing the talking herself.

“He didn’t say much--”

“That’d be a first.”

“—but he said enough to make me feel like a massive dick.” 

Natasha laughs humourlessly, “Not your fault.” After a moment, she turns to face him, “Although, my SHIELD file is sitting right there on the internet. Never occurred to you to take a look?” She’s genuinely curious.

He looks a little shifty, “Actually, I did read some of it, right at the beginning.”

She shrugs, “I would have done.”

“But that was some info-dump you guys orchestrated. Lots to get through. I barely knew you back then, yours wasn’t the most interesting.” 

Natasha smirks slightly, “Why do I feel mildly insulted?”

He chuckles, and continues, “And then, when I knew you, it didn’t feel right.”

“I wouldn’t have minded. The whole rest of the world has.”

“Still.”

They’re quiet for a moment; an owl hoots somewhere in the distance. They both watch it swooping low over the trees.

Natasha breaks the silence, “It’s not all there, you know. There’s a lot exists only on paper. And Tony…. sanitised the dump a little. I didn’t ask him to.”

“I would never have imagined that you did.”

“You wouldn’t have found the answer to your question there.” She’s not sure why she says what she says next. Just that he did ask, and she hasn’t given him an answer yet. She takes a breath, her expression blank, “I first killed a child when I was eleven years old.”

She sees Rhodey’s eyes widen in her peripheral vision, sees his grip on the railing tighten. His hand seems to spasm towards her, and then change its mind, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

He seems to struggle with something, “I wish you hadn’t had to—“

“Don’t.” Her voice has a hard edge to it now, “You don’t get to wish parts of my life away. That’s my call.”

He swallows, looks like he wants to say something, and then stops himself. He processes for a moment before nodding, “Ok.” He relaxes his hands on the railing, “Ok, I get that. Sorry.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, and he lifts his hands in surrender, “Ok, no more apologising! I’m done, I promise.

“Good. I wouldn’t want to have to hurt you.” The edge has receded from her voice and her expression is not open, but certainly less controlled. 

They stand there for a while after that, appreciating the company but not having to talk. Just letting their own thoughts get absorbed by the landscape. Natasha watches the owl scope out its prey, circle and then dive behind the trees. It reappears a few moments later with something small and helpless in its beak. 

A little while later, there are noises on the stairs behind them. A furious, whispered argument seems to have broken out on the landing below. Natasha looks at Rhodey, and raises an eyebrow. He shrugs. They both wait to see what comes next.

Eventually, someone climbs to the top landing. The footsteps are frustrated and heavier than usual, but unmistakeably Wanda. The door opens with a bang.

“See. Everything is fine. What did I tell you?!” She rounds on Steve and Tony who have reached the roof behind her. They look a bit sheepish. Tony scratches behind his ear, and Steve tries to catch Natasha’s eye over his shoulder.

She smirks at them. “Yes, everything is fine because some of us can have an adult conversation without it turning into a fire fight.” She looks directly at Tony as she says it, and he splutters.

“Hey, that was one time! And you and Steve broke the coffee table!” Steve looks even more sheepish.

Natasha crosses her arms, her expression is deadpan but there’s laughter in her eyes. “Not a fire fight. And he started it.”

Tony splutters again. Rhodey’s trying desperately not to look too amused, Wanda’s still silently fuming, and the rooftop is starting to feel a little crowded. So much for quiet contemplation. 

Tony breaks the silence. “As much as I love rooftop parties, I’m freezing my balls off out here.” He heads back towards the door, with Wanda and Rhodey at his heels.

Steve looks at Natasha, still standing by the railing. “You coming?” 

She nods, “Give me a minute.” 

“Sam’s making cocktails.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to miss that. I won’t be long.” He grins at her, and she turns away and hears the door click shut behind them. The stars and the fields and the trees are exactly as they were and she takes a moment to breathe them in. She grips the railing tightly, grounding herself. After a few minutes she’s had her fill of the big picture; she turns to join the others inside.

  


***

  


_Now, God knows where_

When Natasha comes back to herself it’s because she’s shivering violently. Night has fallen and the temperature has dropped considerably. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was snowing outside. She checks her body. Ribs – Three broken. Wrists – one might be fractured. Right thigh – throbbing painfully, but stitches intact. 

She’s curled on her side, back pressed against the wall under the high, barred opening. It’s freezing. The metal at her wrists and ankles is like ice, and her feet are picking up a worryingly blue tinge. She struggles to sit up, ignoring the protests from her injured ribs, and inches her way across the cell towards the internal wall in the hope that it will be warmer. She twists to tuck her feet underneath her. It’s awkward and uncomfortable but should give them a chance to thaw out.

Exhaustion hits her in a wave and she leans heavily against the wall, lets her eyelids droop shut. She thinks it’s been at least twenty-four hours since she last ate and the exertion of crossing the room has taken more out of her than she would like. But she pushes the thought of food out of her mind – it’s not a problem she is going to be able to solve any time soon. 

Natasha knows she should try to sleep. The pragmatic, professional part of her says that if it’s the only thing she can do to conserve her strength for when an opportunity arises, then that is what she should do. But the cold and the moonlight and the restraints around her wrists are taking her back to Russian winters in an under-heated dormitory every time she tries to shut her eyes. She grits her teeth in frustration. She needs to be better than this. She normally is better than this. She still has a job to do. But the last few weeks have stirred everything up and it’s all far too close to the surface.

She tries to distract herself instead, turning her encounter with Franz and Ange over in her mind, examining it for information. She takes a moment to savour the knowledge that the other Avengers succeeded in extracting their precious cargo, before turning her mind to her own predicament. She has the nugget of an idea, but it relies on an opportunity she’s not sure she’s going to get. She files it away. 

The sound of familiar heavy boots starts echoing down the hallway. Natasha steels herself. She tries to look on the bright side – at least the extra body heat might help her get warm.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It doesn’t take Franz long to figure out that beating the shit out of her isn’t getting him anywhere. Natasha’s crouched on the floor spitting blood after Ange’s latest assault when he leaves the room and returns a few moments later with a knife poised in his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings as per Chapter 1

_One week ago, Avenger’s HQ_

“Omff.”

Wanda hits the mat for the sixth time that morning. She takes a moment to catch her breath, and then gracelessly scrambles back to her feet.

“Let me try again.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow, “You sure?”

“Yes.” She nods emphatically, looking exhausted but determined.

“Right then.”

When Natasha had first suggested to Wanda that she teach her how to fight hand-to-hand, to say it had not gone down well would have been an understatement. Wanda had raged that she didn’t need to, that her magic (or whatever it was) could take down anyone who tried to take her on. It wasn’t a bad point, but it didn’t take Natasha much digging to uncover that she just didn’t want to have to accept that she didn’t have Pietro to watch her back any more. 

After that, she’d given her some space, let her process her grief and come back on her own terms. It was three months later, when Natasha had beaten her in a sparring match three times in a row without any weapons that she’d finally decided she was ready to learn. And so here they were. Progress was slow, glacial you might say, but Wanda was nothing if not committed and Natasha’s respect for her grew every time she scrambled back up, wiped the sweat from her brow and asked to go again.

They face-off opposite each other, Natasha waiting for Wanda to make the first move. She sees the slight shift in weight, the subtle flick of her gaze that the younger girl hasn’t yet managed to suppress. She dives in towards Wanda’s soon-to-be unguarded side before realising with surprise that it was a feint and Wanda’s right food is swinging around towards her midriff. She ducks, rolling away, feeling the displaced air whistle over her head. She savours a nugget of satisfaction before turning her attention back to the task at hand. Wanda’s knocked off balance, attempts to twist around and aim a flailing fist at Natasha’s head. She grabs it, uses the momentum to flip her over her hip.

Wanda hits the mat again with a soft groan, “Eurgh.”

Natasha offers her a hand, and pulls her up, “You started well.”

“Not well enough.” 

“Trust me, I’ve had a hell of a lot more practice.” Natasha smiles wryly and then considers Wanda thoughtfully, a hint of mischief in her eyes, “I think I’d lay odds on you coming out of a fight with one standard Hydra goon with all of your limbs intact.” She looks up over Wanda’s shoulder as the door to the gym opens and Steve looks in. He has a file tucked under his arm and he looks troubled.

Wanda huffs, “I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”

“Do.” She looks questioningly at Steve as he slips in.

“Don’t mind me.” He takes a seat on a bench in the corner. “I’ll wait until you’re finished.”

“We are.” Natasha responds.

Wanda looks like she wants to protest but Natasha shakes her head. “You need to know when to stop, kid. Take a shower. We’ll go again tomorrow.” She herds Wanda out of the room, and then finds Steve staring at her.

“What?”

“I just never took you to be the maternal type.” 

“Shut up, Rogers.” She glares at him. “So, what brings you down here this fine morning?” She throws over her shoulder as she hoists the sparring mats onto the neat stack in the corner of the gym. “What did Maria want?”

Steve gestures vaguely at the file in his hand, “Fury sent through some intel.”

“Figured as much. Anything exciting?” She tosses the last mat on the pile, throws her bag over her shoulder, and walks over to join him. He looks a little shell-shocked closer up, and she drops the jovial tone. “Sorry. Do you want to do this in the office?”

He nods, “Yeah, I think that would be a good idea.”

They don’t say much on the walk there. They drop by Natasha’s room to dump her gym bag and she considers having a quick shower, but Steve has started fidgeting, twisting the file in his hands, and she decides that it can wait. If anyone is offended by the smell of sweat, they can get over themselves. 

They reach their office in silence. It overlooks the grounds, with a large floor-ceiling window on one wall. Two pine desks, a couple of bookshelves and filing cabinets and a spider plant (well, there have been several, they’re not very good at watering them) and it all looks a little too normal for the sort of operations they tend to plan in it. Steve’s desk is military tidy, every sheet of paper filed the minute it comes in, and a neat handwritten ‘to-do’ list the only thing left out on his desk. Natasha’s is…tidy enough. She’s a bit less into lists, and a bit more, perhaps appropriately, into spider-diagrams. Her brain works with connections between chaos, and she can’t think without a little bit of clutter.  
Steve shuts the door behind them as Natasha pulls her chair around to his desk so they can talk without feeling like one of them is being interviewed. They both sit.

“Want to tell me what this is about?”

Steve hands her the file in response.

“Ok.” She takes it from him and props it open on the desk, bracing herself for photographs of a familiar face and a metal arm. But that’s not what this is. Now she’s confused. 

“Another Hydra base?” That’s big news, sure, but it’s not ‘you should read this now, let’s speak in the office’ kind of big.

“Keep reading.” 

“Right.” 

By the time she reaches the end of the file, her insides have turned to ice. 

“Fuck.” She closes it, slides it back across the desk and rests her head in her hands.

“I think that just about sums it up.” She can feel Steve’s eyes on her without looking up and she really really wishes he would stop looking so fucking concerned for one second. 

“Nat, you ok?”

“Yeah. I—“ The shock is slowly turning to rage, and it’s all she can do to keep her face impassive and stop her hands from shaking and _Jesus Christ, Romanoff, get a grip on yourself._ “I need to take a shower.”

“Nat?”

“Just— I’ll be back. And I’ll be fine and we can deal with this. I just— I need some space.” She’s out of the door without giving him the chance to respond, striding down the hallways projecting a ‘try to talk to me and I will make you regret it’ aura she perfected long ago. 

She just about makes it to her own bathroom before she throws up.

  


***

  


_Now, God knows where_

It doesn’t take Franz long to figure out that beating the shit out of her isn’t getting him anywhere. Natasha’s crouched on the floor spitting blood after Ange’s latest assault when he leaves the room and returns a few moments later with a knife poised in his hand. 

Natasha has always appreciated knives, she just prefers them in her own hands. She watches as the blade glints in a shaft of early morning sunlight, her mind working out angles, forces and trajectories, visualising the roll and twist it would take to sweep his legs out from under him and grab the blade from his hand. But, even if she doesn’t puncture a lung on the way, she can’t work out what comes after. She keeps thinking. They’ll slip up eventually, everyone does. She just hopes it’ll happen soon. She’s running out of time.

“What do you think, Natalia? Do you like it?” His voice is soft and a little nasal. Natasha ignores him, her expression entirely blank. She stopped pretending to be afraid several hours ago when it became too exhausting, and too distracting. She doesn’t flinch as the blade slices down her sleeve and into the flesh of her upper arm. She’s felt worse.

“It’s a simple enough question, Ms Romanova, it doesn’t have to be this hard.”

She stares at him, boring her gaze into his brain as Ange grabs her hand, pushes the tip of the knife into her palm, and twists.

“Where. Did. They. Go?” 

“I. Don’t. Know.” She mimics him tonelessly, earning herself a hard backhand across the face. She licks blood off her lip, pushes the pain into a tiny corner of her mind and closes it down tightly. _Later. I can deal with that later._

Franz’s hands start twitching. He grows more and more impatient with every passing minute. Eventually, he snaps. “Give me the knife. I’ll do it myself.”

Natasha is dragged up by her hair again. She tries to stay on her feet, but stumbles and the pain tearing through her scalp is no worse than the indignity. 

Franz’s eyes are cruel, he moves suddenly, pressing the blade to her throat. “Now, tell me where they are, little spider, or I will slit your neck from ear to ear and gut you whilst you bleed out.”

“No you won’t.” Her voice is steady.

“And why is that?” The knife presses a little harder against her jugular.

“You need me. You can’t risk your little project being turned against you.” She almost spits the words out. “You need to recover it, and I know where they went. And the longer you keep me here, the more likely it is that someone will come after me. I think that’s what we in the business call a hostage situation. No point in a dead hostage.” She shrugs, almost nonchalantly, “And in the meantime you can see if you can be imaginative enough to get the information out of me. It’s a win-win situation as far as I can see.” 

They lock eyes and for a tense moment Natasha wonders if she’s read the situation wrong, pushed too far. She holds his gaze. After a minute that feels like the rest of her life, the knife clatters to the floor and her stomach explodes in pain as he takes a violent swing at it. Still held up by Ange’s hand in her hair, she forces out between wheezes, “Did you forget you already tried that one? I think you need some new ideas.”

  


***

  


_50 miles from Gdansk, Poland, two days ago._

“Nat, come in.” Steve hisses into his earpiece. No response. “Nat, are we secure?” He hates the waiting part of a mission, hates the feeling of not knowing what’s going on, not being able to dive in and help if it all starts to go wrong. There’s a reason he doesn’t do a lot of covert ops. 

“Just a minute.” She pants eventually, and he can hear a muffled thump in the background. “Ok, secure.” He breathes a sigh of relief.

“Copy that, we’re coming in. Stand back.” 

He waits for Natasha’s usual sarcastic response, but all he gets is a curt, “Copy.”

Steve nods at Wanda standing in anticipation beside him, “You’re up.”

Creeping red tendrils spread across her hands and up her arms, writhing through the brick wall in front of them. She removes the bricks on at a time, slowly, methodically, silently. The gap grows. Wanda’s eyes widen as she detects movement in the structure above. But Steve’s already there, attaching Tony’s latest gadget to the top and bottom of the hole. The magnetic repulsion between them replaces the missing structural support. The hole is big enough for them to pass through.

They slip into the building. “Rhodey, we’re in,” he relays, “All quiet up there?”

“Quiet as the dead.” Rhodey responds. Steve catches a whispered ‘Holy shit’ from Sam as the dust clears.

Natasha is waiting for them on the other side, their cargo ready to go as planned. She looks strained, but Steve knows better than to ask her if she’s ok. He takes up position with her by the door whilst Wanda, Vision and Sam fly loads up to the roof and the waiting Quinjet. 

“No trouble?” He asks.

She shakes her head, and counts off on her fingers, “Three security guards down. Bodies hidden. Surveillance on the roof looped. Sensors switched off. Charges set. Heat sensors lining the corridor outside. All exactly as requested.” She indicates the tablet in her hand, where a series of infra-red images show absolutely nothing. 

There’s a question in Steve’s eyebrows, “Nothing else?”

She shakes her head, “No. No time.” There’s something in her eyes he can’t quite place. It scares him a little. He wants to reach out to her, but he’s not sure how. 

_Time to wait, again._ He’s desperately hoping for a quiet night, but all the waiting and creeping around is making him jumpy. The dread and anticipation is always far worse than the thing itself. He glances behind him every now and then, checking to see how the others are getting on. Six down, eighteen to go. Then fifteen. Twelve. Wanda has just left the room on her fourth trip when a splash of colour appears on Nat’s screen. 

His heart sinks.

Two figures, walking down the long corridor towards them. He moves towards the door, but Natasha’s there before him, “I’ll head them off. You stay here.” She brokers no argument, “Last line of defence.” 

He sees her glance behind them at the contents of the room for the first time since they broke through the wall, and he can’t argue with her. He nods, “Roger that.” She slips out, leaving her tablet behind with him.

He presses his finger to his earpiece. “We’ve got company heading this way. Gonna need you to pick up the pace.” A chorus of ‘Copy that’s’ come back in response. It goes without saying that they can’t leave anything behind. Steve’s hands are twitching with impatience as he watches Nat’s heat signature moving down the corridor, pausing in wait around the last corner for the figures heading towards her. He glances behind him again. Nine to go.

The two hostile heat-signatures have just reached the turning, and he watches as they merge with Nat’s, listening for the muffled thumps as they go down. After less than a minute, he hears her voice in his ear again “Two down. But I think they suspected we were here. I don’t know if they raised the alarm before I got to them.”

Steve swears under his breath. Six still to go. And now there are more colourful splodges approaching from the other side. “Nat, you’ve got at least four more hostiles on your six.” There have been no audible alarms, but perhaps that’s not surprising. This is the most top-secret of secret Hydra bases, and loud, blaring alarms tend to alert the surrounding populace to your presence.

He hears her steady breathing as she sprints to head them off, “I’m on it. Don’t move.” 

“Nat, are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m fucking sure Steve. Anyone gets through that door, take them down. But we are not risking someone slipping in whilst we’re both—“ Her words get swallowed by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Nat’s comm channel is still open and through the cacophony of clatters and thumping that follows, Steve’s sure he hears a grunt of pain. 

“Nat?” He glances around and meets the anguish in Sam’s eyes as he flies back in for his penultimate trip. Wanda follows, the sweat on her brow belying her exhaustion, but they can’t stop yet. Three to go. 

“I’m fine. They’re down.”

Steve breathes again, “Get your arse back here then, Romanoff.” He thinks her hears her laugh. “Rhodey, have they noticed we parked a quinjet on their roof yet?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Right, let’s get ready to clear out.” He keeps an eye on the tablet as he moves back towards the hole in the wall and Vision returns for his last trip. Nat’s splodge is moving far too  
slowly. 

“Nat, come on!”

“I told you, I’m coming.”

His blood freezes, “Nat—“

“Hold onto your knickers, Steve, I said I’m—“

“No, listen, we’ve got more incoming. Six from your end, more at the other.”

“Right.” He can do the math as fast as she can. 

“I’m coming out.”

“Don’t you dare—“

“Nat—!“

“Wanda can’t defend herself whilst she’s flying, not when she’s carrying—“

“Rhodey’s up there—“

“He’s got enough to worry about. You’ve got to get them all out, Steve.” It’s as close as he’s ever heard Nat come to pleading. Sam’s leaving now, Wanda about to pass him on the way back. The thumps and bangs have started up again, and the group that didn’t have to pass the Black Widow are now approaching the door. He readies his shield, bracing himself and focussing on the fact that he can still hear Nat’s heavy breathing in his ear.

The door slams open. Steve flings his shield and rolls behind one of the beds, feeling the shadow of a bullet whistle past his ear. The shield ricochets off three men before returning to his arm. There’s no time for another assault. Bullets are flying and Wanda is ready to leave. 

“Er, Steve, I think they might have noticed us now” Rhodey’s voice breaks in.

Steve covers Wanda with his shield as she manoeuvres herself through the wall and follows quickly after her. He scales the side of the building in a daze, blood roaring in his ears. Rhodey and Vision are comfortably downing soldiers as they pop out of the fire escape door onto the roof, but there’s two helicopters readying for take-off at the corner of his vision and they’re carrying too precious a cargo to take any unnecessary risks. He sprints after Wanda across the roof, Rhodey covering them as they go and Sam launches the aircraft the second they roll inside. 

“Nat! Nat, do you copy?!” No response. He can’t hear her breathing any more. He swears violently. Wanda looks shell-shocked. 

“Steve!” Sam’s voice calls urgently from the front of the aircraft, “Nat-- The charges—“

_Shit shit shit._

His heart skips a beat and the world slows down.

He fumbles for the tablet attached to his belt. The charges Nat set when she entered the facility are programmed to detonate as soon as the quinjet is a safe distance away. Sam has slammed on the brakes but they have too much momentum and they’re still pulling away at terrifying rate. Steve’s fingers are shaking as he desperately tries to reach the programme that will disarm them, but barely three seconds after Sam’s cry he sees the first explosion go off.

A ball of fire erupts from the control centre, setting off a chain reaction which has the entire facility engulfed in flame in a matter of moments. 

“Nat!” 

His cry is strangled as he and Wanda stare out the window in helpless disbelief. He’s frantically stabbing at the tablet again, loading up the programme which tracks their earpieces, desperately hoping not to see her flashing dot lying still in the same corridor he’d left her. He finally locates it as he sees Rhodey line up the arm of his suit with the helicopters which have just emerged from the smoke in the opposite direction.

“Rhodey, stop!” His heart’s in his throat. “Nat’s in one of them.” He hears Rhodey curse with relief and frustration and watches him turn away.  
Steve slumps against the wall as the distance between them and the facility lengthens. His mind is torn between two causes which desperately need his attention, and he knows which one he has to choose, because it’s what they came for and Nat will have a slow and painful death reserved for him if he abandons them for her. But _damn it_ , it still hurts.

He switches the channel on his earpiece, “Hill? Rogers here. We’re clear. We’ll be with you in sixty minutes.”

Her voice comes back a second later, “All present and correct?”

He pauses, grits his teeth, “Nat’s MIA.”

He hears her swear before she moves away from the microphone. There’s a muffled, urgent conversation in the background before she comes back on, “We’ve picked up the tracker in her earpiece, but the signal went dead a couple of seconds ago. It’ll take us at least thirty minutes to get an operative to her last known location.” The implication is clear: by which time she could be more or less anywhere. If she’s even still alive.

He sighs, “Do whatever you can,” and cuts the transmission. He closes his eyes, getting a hold of himself, and then turns to Wanda, “You holding up ok?”

She nods mutely, as he gathers up the girl in her arms and carries her over to join her comrades. He feels numb as he surveys the aircraft: twenty four little girls – twenty four would-be assassins – sleeping the sleep of the sedated.


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s not.” Natasha’s voice is hard and dark. There’s an inferno behind her eyes. “There was a fire. People got shot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Warnings as per Chapter One

_Five days ago, Avenger’s HQ_

Natasha is the last to arrive, arms full of files and maps and blueprints – all the data her and Steve have been able to gather over the last frantic forty-eight hours. Steve went ahead to make coffee and scrounge up some edible supplies from their Stark-stocked kitchen whilst she cleared out their office and tried to clear her head. He’s laying it all out on the table now, trying not to get in the way of Wanda and Rhodey’s controlled but furious argument about who just beat who in a sparring match. Sam helps him pass out plates whilst Vision plunges the coffee pot.

“If you two are quite finished..?” Natasha quells Wanda and Rhodey with a look, only her eyes betraying her amusement. She’s fired up the computer, preparing the images and satellite photographs they’ve retrieved for viewing on the big screen. She stands behind a chair, hands resting on the back of it, and if her fingers go a little whiter than usual, no-one chooses to comment. 

“Does everyone have enough caffeine and sugar not to get grumpy for the next two hours?” Steve asks, as they all take their seats at the conference table. Wanda studies the spread critically before nodding her satisfaction. Honestly, sometimes it feels more like babysitting a kindergarten class than managing a highly trained team of super-powered operatives. He catches Natasha’s eye across the table.

“Okay then,” he continues, suddenly serious, “Forty eight hours ago, we received an intelligence packet from Fury detailing a Hydra base he’s uncovered in Poland. Their operations are…“ he searches for the word, “…concerning.”

“Unlike all those entirely un-concerning Hydra bases we’ve come across?” Rhodey interjects.

Natasha picks up from Steve, “A little more concerning. They’ve recreated, or are attempting to recreate, the Red Room.” Sam stops with his mug halfway to his mouth. Everyone is staring at her. She finally pulls out the chair and sits down. 

Rhodey drops the sarcasm, “We’re shutting them down, right?”

“Right.” Natasha raises a sardonic eyebrow at him, “What did you think Steve and I were doing all weekend?”

Sam manages to finish lifting his mug to his mouth, and takes an innocent sip, “That’s a relief.” Steve throws a pen at him. It’s an old joke, a routine they play every other week that no longer deserves comment.

Steve pulls a satellite image up on the screen, “The base is about fifty miles from Gdansk in Poland, and it’s been running for less than a year. They have twenty four girls between the ages of five and eight.”

Natasha’s voice is quiet, “If they’re a true copy-cat organisation, and everything we have suggests that they are, there should be twenty eight.” 

The implication is clear.

Sam has gone dangerously still, “How do we know it’s a copy-cat, and not the same people?”

“It’s not.” Natasha’s voice is hard and dark. There’s an inferno behind her eyes. “There was a fire. People got shot.”

No-one asks for any more information.

Wanda’s eyes have narrowed, she seems to have lost interest in the cakes, “So. What’s the plan?”

Steve steps up, “We have two objectives: the primary one is to get the kids to safety. If we can destroy the base whilst we’re there, then that’s fine by me.” He looks around, “This isn’t going to be like anything we’ve done before. We can’t risk any casualties. We don’t want a fire fight.”

Vision speaks up, “These children, will they want to come with us?”

Rhodey looks up in alarm but Natasha nods grimly, “They might not. They’ve been brainwashed. They’re likely to be hostile.”

Rhodey looks at her in disbelief, “They’re kids!”

Her eyes harden a little, “I know.”

He looks contrite, and seems to be struggling with something within him. She takes pity on him, if it can be called that, “We’re going in at night. They’re handcuffed to their beds. We sedate them and get them out.” Sam looks a little sick, he’s glanced down at Natasha’s wrist and taken in the thin, white scars which normally go unnoticed.

Steve looks around the table, “I don’t like it much either. But we can’t take any chances. It’s too risky – for them and for us.” There’s a charged moment between him and Natasha as he says it. It’s reminiscent of parents making pointed remarks rather than continuing an argument in front of the kids.

Everyone looks a little uncomfortable, but they can see the sense in his words. No-one had been looking forward to corralling twenty-four elementary school-aged kids out of a potentially deadly situation even before Vision had spoken. And Steve is right – it’s less risky, puts them more in control. But it feels like kidnapping and none of them feel very good about it. 

Steve starts handing out files, “Have a read through these, eat some food. We’ve got a lot to get through.”

The evening progresses more or less as usual after that. They argue over tactics, throwing ideas around until something satisfactory gets spit out. A small squabble breaks out over food. Wanda finishes the second pot of coffee before anyone else can get hold of it. Tony turns up to collect something, or possibly to drop something off, and joins the briefing as their ‘technical adviser’. Natasha is tense, her wit a little slower than normal. It’s nobody’s fault, but she feels exposed.

Wanda corners her as they’re stacking empty plates and clearing the room, “You’re not alone. This is not just your fight.” She’s solemn and serious and Natasha just nods. 

But she’s wrong, because it is.

  
***  


_Now, God knows where_

Natasha’s lungs are screaming and her vision is starting to turn black at the edges. From the little corner of her mind where she has secreted her consciousness she wonders for the first time if she might die here. But then her head is pulled back and the light starts to return and she falls to the floor, retching and coughing up water and breathing great lungfuls of glorious oxygen. Franz is leaning over her, and he prods her with a foot to turn her onto her back. 

“Are you done yet Ms. Romanoff? Are you ready to talk? Or would you like another go?”

“Go fuck yourself.” She intends it as a command, but her voice is strangled, squeezing its way out between wheezing and coughing and _jesus I need more air._ She feels Ange’s hands grabbing her roughly around the shoulders again, digging into a fresh cut in her upper arm, pulling her to her feet, one hand at the back of her head as she plunges her back down into the tank. The water is icy cold but she’s numb to it now. Her body has stopped listening to her and she can feel herself twitching and jerking under Ange’s hold as the darkness starts to cloud in again. Her mind is fraying at the edges. She’s starting to lose control.

She’s nearly gone, this time. One moment her lungs are on fire and the darkness is closing in and the next someone is slapping her around the face and she’s coughing up more water than she thought her lungs could hold. She doesn’t, or can’t, sit up. The water has seeped through her clothes – she’s soaked through and she’s shivering from shock or cold or both but she can’t feel anything. 

Franz is watching her, curiously. He crouches down, getting closer to her level and gestures at Ange to take the tank away. Natasha should feel relief but it all seems a very long way away. Her throat is raw from coughing up water, and she struggles to get her breathing back under control. Eventually, she looks up. 

Franz is still watching her. She fights to sit up. She hates looking up at him.

His voice, when he eventually speaks, is scathing. “Would you really die for them?” 

Natasha feels like she has been emptied out, taken apart, and there’s no room left for anything but the truth. She thinks of a little girl called Natalia who she never had the chance to know, “Yes.”

He looks at her for a moment, his eyes have narrowed. “That’s not how you were trained, Natalia.” 

It’s like he’s turned a key inside her, found the last of that cold ball of rage and reignited it. “It’s Natasha.” She spits it at him, a thread of steel finding its way back into her soul.

He sighs, he seems disappointed somehow, “We’ll find it, _Natasha_. Whatever it is that scares you enough, we’ll find it.”

She smirks at him, holds his gaze, exhausted and hurting but so, so far from being done, “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done before.” 

He scoffs, turns to leave, slams the door behind him. Natasha lets out the shaky breath she’s been holding. She wants to drift away again, wants to sink into her dreams and play baseball on the Barton farm. Wants to gossip with Laura and watch cartoons with the kids and help cook big family dinners. She snaps the lid closed on it almost instantly, locks them up tight in a distant corner of her mind. Her heart aches. She lied to Franz; there’s one thing that might scare her enough. And she can feel her control slipping, feel her face and body doing things she didn’t explicitly tell them to do. She can’t risk letting something out, so she pushes them as far away as she can, somewhere even her own mind won’t reach them. 

She turns back to cataloguing injuries, counting exits, worrying at half-formed plans and ideas for escape attempts that she can’t quite see through to the end. When she exhausts that, she list the states in alphabetical order, then backwards, then in order of population size from largest to smallest. Capitals of Europe. African countries. Elements of the periodic table. On and on until her mind is full of words and numbers and dates and nothing else.

  
***  


_Three days ago, Avenger’s HQ_

The moon is waxing, a glowing crescent puncturing the night sky, dimming the stars with its icy glow. From her position amongst a pile of paperwork on her office floor, Natasha can just about make out the yellowish light of the house across the way, and she watches as the last lit window turns to darkness.

The complex is quiet, everyone asleep or busy with their own pre-mission rituals. If she listens carefully she can just about make out the sound of Steve working out his adrenaline on an inanimate object in the gym below her. She and Clint used to run the night before, the world dropping away as the miles passed by until they could black-out the moment they hit their beds. She knows she should be out there now, exhausting her body rather than her mind and working out the tension thrumming through her. But she just needs to check this one more time, needs to make sure they haven’t missed something.

She pauses, for a moment, rolling her shoulders and stretching to work out the ache, and her eyes stray to their lonely spider plant. It’s brown and withered again. She pours the rest of her glass of water on it, but it leaks out of the dry soil and pools on Steve’s desk. She groans and decides to ignore it. Massaging her temples, she turns back to scouring files, cross-checking references with the maps spread out on the floor in front of her. She traces the flight-plan and studies blurry satellite images of the drop site, double checks the weather forecast and re-calculates time differences.

A sharp, demanding rap on the door breaks her concentration. She contemplates not answering, but before she has a chance to decide, the door is flung open and Maria has strode in without waiting for an invitation. She’s carrying a heavy looking bag and gives Natasha a look which says ‘Hah, I knew it’ as she sits down emphatically on top of the map she’s examining.

“You,” she says pointedly, “need to stop.”

Natasha glares at her, but she knows she’s right. She’s rattled and she’s letting it show. She sighs and leans her head back against the leg of the desk. It’s not very comfortable.

“Just checking they haven’t changed since yesterday.” She admits, with a wry half smile.

“Have they?”

“Not that I’ve found so far, but there’s always time.” She’s tired, and she’s been alone with her thoughts bouncing back at her off the walls for too long this evening. It feels good to talk to someone.

Maria reaches into the bag slung over her shoulder, pulls out a clear bottle and two glasses. “I bought us a present.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow at her, “Is that a good idea?”

“One glass now to help us sleep, the rest to celebrate when you get back.” It’s a gesture of faith. Natasha’s shoulders relax a little.

“Now that, I can get behind.” She reaches for a glass, but Maria stops her hand.

“Nuh-uh. If you want that, you have to stop this.” She gestures to the maze of paperwork littering the floor. “Which means it all has to go away.”

Natasha groans, sounding somewhat like a petulant child. “Didn’t we agree that you’re not my boss anymore?”

“True, but I have the vodka.” Maria grins.

Natasha makes a brief and half-hearted attempt to swipe it from her, before reluctantly unfolding herself from the floor and starting to sort the piles of paper and slot them back into their files. Maria stands to help, folding the maps and passing them over. There’s still a nagging corner of Natasha’s mind pulling at her sleeve and whispering ‘but what if…?’ but now she’s made the decision to stop, tidying it all away is helping her switch modes. There’s a huge gulf between the meticulous researching and checking and cross-checking that constitutes planning an operation, and the adrenaline-fuelled split-second instinctive decision-making of actually carrying it out. It’s one she normally finds easier to traverse. 

As the last file slides back onto its shelf, Natasha studies the drooping spider plant critically. A crinkled brown leaf flutters to the floor.

“What do you think? Is it time up for Spidey the third?”

Maria nods sorrowfully, “I’m afraid he’s long gone.” 

Natasha lobs the plant neatly into the wastepaper basket and sweeps the stray bits of leaf off the desk, “I’ll buy Steve another one. He’ll never notice the difference.”

They settle back on the floor, Natasha finding a more comfortable position leaning against the side of the bookcase. She laces her fingers together and looks at Maria expectantly, 

“Wasn’t I promised a drink? I’ll fight you for it if I have to.” 

Maria grabs the glasses off the bookshelf, clinking them together in one hand “That won’t be necessary.” 

Before she can pour, there’s another rap on the door. Natasha looks at her curiously; she shrugs. 

“Who is it?” She calls.

“Wanda.” A slightly hesitant voice comes from the other side, “Are you still working?”

Natasha scrambles up and opens the door to find the younger woman standing outside in slippered feet, two glasses and a clear bottle in her hand. “I saw the light under the door. I thought you might like a drink.”

Natasha laughs, “I think I need to get some new hobbies.” She pulls the door wide and gestures to Maria in response to the quizzical look on Wanda’s face.

Maria smirks, “Great minds think alike. Come in, pull up a carpet tile.” Whilst Natasha grasps the bottle from her.

“Ah.” She says conspiratorially, “You brought the good stuff.” 

Wanda grins as she sits down, Maria looks indignant, “Hey, I thought I brought the good stuff.”

Natasha looks at Wanda, then speaks as though to a slow child, “Wanda brought the Russian good stuff, not the Russian-label-but-actually-made-in-Arkansas good stuff.” 

Wanda laughs as Natasha pours them each a glass from her bottle and passes them around. 

“What are we drinking to?” Wanda asks.

Natasha thinks for a moment, gazing at the clear liquid as if she’s searching for something. She starts to say something flippant, but then another thought slips into her mind. 

“Hopscotch.”

Maria’s eyebrows knit together in a question.

“I didn’t learn how to play until Cooper was four.” She remembers a brisk walk in the woods one late fall afternoon, kicking up leaves in a whirl of fiery reds and burnt oranges. Cooper had been into everything, bringing them snails and woodlice, fillings the pockets of his duffle coat with acorns and conkers. She remembers his amazement at a stone which left white marks on his hands, and Laura’s amazement that she didn’t know the game. She remembers laughing. She remembers not being able to understand what it was all for.

Maria nods.

“Oh, and Spidey the third. Long may he rest in peace.” She adds solemnly, a wicked smile playing around her eyes. This time Wanda looks confused, and Natasha points at the crumpled plant in the trash.

They clink their glasses together, “Hopscotch and Spidey the third.”

She savours the satisfying burn in her throat as the drink goes down. The tension is starting to ease out of her shoulders and it’s not because of the alcohol, “You see why this is the good stuff?”

Wanda hums in agreement, whilst Maria looks unconvinced, “I can’t tell the difference.”

“Heathen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I have no idea if any Russian label vodka is actually made in Arkansas.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha sleeps, eventually, and she dreams of Europe, of passing through its capitals, a trail of death in her wake. When it comes, the sound of the cell door unlocking is almost a relief. Her eyes open slowly as she forces her mind into wakefulness. She studies the barred silhouette on the floor. Early evening, she thinks. She can’t remember what time it was when she passed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Warnings as Chapter one

_Now, God knows where_

Natasha sleeps, eventually, and she dreams of Europe, of passing through its capitals, a trail of death in her wake. When it comes, the sound of the cell door unlocking is almost a relief. Her eyes open slowly as she forces her mind into wakefulness. She studies the barred silhouette on the floor. Early evening, she thinks. She can’t remember what time it was when she passed out.

They’ve brought a chair with them this time: large, wooden and sturdy. Ange is weighing it down with sandbags. Natasha wants to laugh: her ability to backflip disappeared with the third cracked rib, but they’re still afraid of her. 

It’s almost become a routine: Ange grasping her by her hair, Natasha struggling to stay on her feet, ignoring screaming ribs and tearing pain in her scalp. She lands in the chair awkwardly, striking her head against the back of it. Ange unlocks her wrists one by one, securing them with leather straps to the arms of the chair. The movement is small, but her muscles protest violently after being held still for so long. 

“Thanks for the furniture, makes it feel real homely.” Her voice is dry and cracked, and Franz ignores her.

Ange disappears again. Natasha closes her eyes and lets her mind wander; she’s had an idea, she thinks it might be the missing piece in one of her half-formed plans, but the cogs in her brain are moving too slowly for it all to slot into place. There’s a small, anxious fragment of her mind worrying about what might happen next and it’s distracting her. She breathes slowly, tries to drift along the surface and shut everything else out.

She’s brought back too soon by a deep rumbling sound: a heavy wheeled object trundling down the corridor. A wave of heat rolls off it as it enters the cell. The small, anxious fragment starts shouting and waving its arms in the air. 

Natasha opens her eyes and lets her senses in. Her stomach contracts. The heat and the smell of burning makes her eyes water, but it’s the poker Ange plunges into the crate of coals in front of her which causes the bile to rise in her throat. There’s something on the end of it that she can’t make out. She swallows rapidly. Franz notices.

“Ah. Thought we’d get there in the end.”

She speaks as though he hasn’t, “Central heating too? You are spoiling me.” Her voice is unsteady.

They wait. She wishes she’d carried on drifting. She should retreat somewhere, come back when it’s all over, but the anxiety is stamping its feet and has been joined by overwhelming dread and it won’t let her go. She shudders. It’s not the pain that she fears – pain is familiar, pain she can control. She knows how to instil it in others, exactly what to hit or twist, when and how hard. Pain is nothing more than data, and she knows how to use it and when to ignore it. This dread is coming from a very different place. Burning, branding, is not about causing pain, it’s not about winning a fight; it’s about leaving a mark, imposing your will on someone else’s body in a way that they cannot forget. It’s about control. 

She’s had enough of other people’s control.

Franz leans over her, one rough hand on each of her wrists, his face right up close to hers. She can see the whites of his eyes and count the individual hairs in his nostrils. Two of his teeth are crooked.

“You know what’s about to happen, don’t you?” She follows his eyes towards the six-legged skull on the sleeve of his jacket. His voice is low, cajoling. “One word. That’s all it would take. And I make all of this go away.” 

She swallows, tips her head to one side, looks like she’s considering for a moment. “No, thanks.”

His expression hardens. He moves behind her and her heart starts to hammer in her chest. She feels his hand in her hair, twisting and holding her head still as his other grips her arm. Ange’s knife slides up her sleeve, tearing away the fabric. She draws blood, but Natasha doesn’t feel it. There’s a deafening roar in her ears and her world is contracting.

She can see a skull and six legs picked out in white hot metal as it moves towards her. 

“Tirana.”

It bursts out of her as a whisper, unbidden.

Everything stops. 

Natasha wants to throw up.

Franz’s glee is palpable, “What did you say?” he hisses.

“Andorra La Vella.” Barely more than a murmur. “Yerevan.” She raises her voice, trying to drown out the pounding of her heart and the roaring in her ears.

His hand twists tighter in her hair. (“Vienna.”) He turns to Ange and hisses, “What is she doing?” 

“Baku. Minsk.” 

“Listing capitals of Europe.” She hears Ange speak for the first time, and her voice is low and surprisingly melodious.

“Brussels. Sarajevo.”

“Alphabetically by country.” Ange continues, her mouth turned up in a smirk.

“Sofia. Zagreb. Nicosia.”

Franz growls in frustration. Natasha closes her eyes.

“Prague. Copenhagen.” 

White hot daggers are stabbing into her left arm, burning up the nerves across her shoulder through to her neck and spine. She’s on fire. She presses her lips together to stop the scream from escaping. _Tallinn. Helsinki. Paris._ She’s twitching and writhing against Franz’s iron grip. _Berlin. Athens._ And then he releases her. She slumps forward, shaking and sweating and choking down bile. Her mind finally breaks free. She floats.

_Budapest._

_Nat, look at me. Nat. You gotta pull yourself together. The job’s not finished._

_Fuck off, Barton._

_Never._

She inhales slowly, exhales, grasps onto the trailing tendrils of her mind and desperately tries to reel it back in. Her heartbeat slows. The cogs start to turn. She pushes out everything, postpones all the grief and rage and despair. It doesn’t matter. The job’s not finished.

She feels the satisfying clunk when all the pieces slot into place. It’s all laid out before her. A thread she can follow and maybe, just maybe, get out of this with what she came for. She holds onto it, counts the seconds, breaks it down step by step. Her universe contracts. The first step. That’s all she needs.

Ange takes her left wrist first, fastening it back into the cuffs still chained to her waist. She takes hold of her right wrist, unbuckles the strap. Lifts. 

The world slows down.

Natasha twists her arm, grabbing Ange’s wrist in her own vice-like grip. She wrenches it forward, unleashing the cold ball of rage burning through the lining of her stomach. Launching herself upwards, she throws Ange off-balance. The larger woman lets out a screech of anger as she goes down. Natasha goes with her, landing on top, wrestling her wrist free and aiming straight for Ange’s hair. She tangles her fingers and pulls. Hard. 

Ange growls in frustration, flipping them both over and bashing Natasha’s head sharply against the floor. Her vision wavers. She feels her grip loosen and her hand slipping, but it doesn’t matter. She has what she was after. Ange grabs her free wrist, forcing it back into the cuffs, tightening them until she can almost feel her bones grinding together. As she gets up, hair in disarray, she stamps hard on Natasha’s bare feet. Something cracks. 

It doesn’t matter. Ange’s hairpins are digging into her clenched fist.

She inhales. Exhales. Centres her mind and focuses on the next step.

  


***

  


_Two days ago, Cwmduad, Carmarthenshire, Wales_

Steve stares unseeingly out the window. The countryside is all wild, rolling hills and winding country lanes and the tendrils of golden sunrise kissing the peaks would be stunning if he was in any mood to appreciate it. They’ve taken refuge in a farmhouse and converted barn, surrounded on all sides by desolate greenery. Agent Hill had a specially selected group of social workers and medical professionals take over care of the girls as soon as the quinjet landed. What will happen next, no-one is quite sure. They’ll try to find their families, those that have them, and the others they’ll just have to take one day at a time.

Now they’ve landed with their mission accomplished and nothing else he can usefully do for the time being, Steve has retreated to the attic room of the barn and let his mind start worrying about Natasha. He knows she’s probably fine, knows they’ll receive a message from her in a couple of hours asking them to come and pick her up amidst the carnage of Hydra operatives she’ll have taken down without so much as breaking her stride. But he keeps replaying their last conversation in his head, and he remembers too keenly her nearly bleeding out from a bullet to the shoulder in a prison van in DC without so much as a whimper. 

He’d called Tony from the jet. There’d been a lot of yelling, mostly aimed at Nat, but he’d had his suit on and was on his way over the Atlantic almost before the words ‘MIA’ had left Steve’s mouth. He’ll land in a few hours, and in the meantime Friday is scouring satellite photos for the helicopters they think she left on. Steve had briefly thought of Banner, after that, but they have no way to contact him and much as the Hulk might be an asset, Steve’s rather afraid that his considerable rage would be aimed straight at him.

He weighs the phone in his hands, before making his next call.

On the other side of the Atlantic it’s 1am and the phone rings four times before Laura manages to find the source of the infernal racket coming from her night stand. Her voice is groggy, “Hello?”

“It’s Steve.”

“Steve who?”

“Rogers.”

She laughs slightly, “Right. Who else would be calling from an unregistered international number in the middle of the night? I’ll wake Clint.”

“Thanks.” She jabs Clint sharply in the side, he groans and rolls over. That man could sleep through a zombie apocalypse when he’s at home in his own bed. She jabs him again. 

“Clint. Phone. It’s Steve.”

On the other hand, he goes from dead-to-the-world to bright-eyed and bushy tailed in about 5 seconds when he needs to. He sits up immediately, and takes the phone from her, 

“Hey Cap, what’s on fire?”

Steve takes a breath, “Nat’s missing.”

Laura can hear both sides of the conversation from her side of the bed. Clint doesn’t waste any words on pointless questions, “What do you need?”

“You guys have ways to communicate, right? She radioed you before, with Ultron…” Steve trails off, he sounds unsure. 

“Yup. Couple of frequencies, encryption keys, codes we’ve used before. I’ll send the details right over – have you got a secure communication channel?” 

“Send them to Tony, he's on his way over now.”

“Ok, give me five minutes” Clint starts to struggle out of bed, clumsily pulling on pyjama pants over his boxers with one hand. Laura mimes at him to put the phone down. “Look, Cap, I’ll call you back once I’m done, ok?”

“Sure.”

Laura starts getting herself out of bed – it doesn’t look like either of them will be getting back to sleep for a while yet. She gathers her own pajamas, and throws Clint a pair of socks. The floors downstairs are freezing at this time of year. He looks back at her gratefully and she can see that his mind is already a million miles away. “I’ll make some coffee,”

“Thanks.” Clint gives her a quick kiss as he leaves, “She’ll be fine.”

Laura’s far too practiced by now at waiting for one or the other of them to re-surface after a mission goes sideways. She nods, “I know.”

  


***

  


_Now, God knows where_

The door slams shut behind Franz. Natasha gets to work.

She starts on her wrists, bending the pin into shape and carefully inserting it into the lock. She has to use her left hand. She’s not sure if her right wrist is fractured, but it’s definitely something and she can’t get it to bend at the angle she needs. There’s a satisfying click as the manacle releases and she lets out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding as the blood returns to her fingers. She makes quick work of her other wrist. 

The relief is almost indescribable. She moves slowly, stretching her shoulders and easing out the stiffness. Every movement is painful, but she’s getting her body back under her own control.

The chain around her waist takes a little longer, the padlock a little trickier to work, but that too bends to her will and she grimaces as she feels the bruises it has pressed into her spine. Once it’s released, she hooks the padlock back around the end of the chain and tests the weight of it, imagines how it might crack a skull. Then she sets it aside and tries to reach her feet without crushing her ribs. She can’t. She grits her teeth and a gets on with it anyway.

Eventually, the manacles fall away and she allows herself to sag against the wall for a second, breathing hard. The sun is setting outside. The shaft of light falling into the cell has turned cool and gloomy and the fluorescent lamp above is starting to cast its own shadows. She feels her mind starting to drift away, and it’s so tempting just to stop, just to pause and rest, only for a little while. But she knows that if she stops, she won’t start again. She rallies herself, forces herself into alertness, focuses on the next step. She has to stand up.

She studies the foot Ange stamped on. It’s bruised and starting to swell and she prays that it will be able to take her weight. She tears off the remains of her bloody left sleeve without looking (she _can’t_ look) and uses it to wrap it up. Then, slowly, for the first time in three days, she stands. The blood runs screaming from her head and spots appear before her eyes. Pain shoots up her leg, but her foot holds. She breathes again. 

Slowly, unused and injured muscles screeching in protest, she starts to stretch, testing the limits of her motion. She’s deliberate and methodical: she needs to know which moves are painful, and which impossible; which parts of her will fail if she tries to rely on them in a fight, and which she can use if she’s careful. She needs to learn her body again. She can’t afford to be surprised. She thinks she can fire a gun in her left hand; her right will probably shatter from the recoil.

Night is falling, and the cool air is growing teeth. She hopes Franz’s growing impatience will play in her favour and she won’t have long to wait. She has to stay warm, so she keeps moving, with one ear alert for footsteps outside the door. She breathes slowly, her heartbeat steadying. The movements are comforting, familiar, and she lets herself fall into a trancelike state, lets the cell and the pain and the fear fall away until it could be any of a thousand other days, in a hundred other places.

The sun is fully set by the time the regular beat of rubber soles on concrete filters through her consciousness. She’s calm, almost leisurely, as she finishes her last stretch and settles herself in the corner behind the door. She curls up with her back to the room, casting her body in shadow, and wraps the chain around her left hand, heavy brass padlock dangling off the end. She visualises the exact sequence of movements which will result in the crunch of metal on bone. 

The lock beeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger! So not sorry...
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read and commented so far : )


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha can feel their movement behind her, see their shadows flickering on the wall.
> 
> The door clicks shut. The lock beeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Warnings as per Chapter 1

_Now, God knows where_

Natasha can feel their movement behind her, see their shadows flickering on the wall.

The door clicks shut. The lock beeps.

She stands and turns in one smooth movement, the chain in her hand whirling over her head. Ange doesn’t even have time to look surprised before her skull cracks and she drops like a stone. Franz reaches into his jacket; for a knife or a gun, Natasha’s not sure which, but he’s too late. She grabs his wrist before it gets there, throwing all her weight into twisting it behind his back. He grunts in pain and sweat breaks out on his forehead. She twists harder, swinging the chain in her other hand and wrapping it around his neck.

He struggles fruitlessly, and she leans forward, her mouth against his ear and her hair brushing gently against his neck. “Cwmduad, Carmarthenshire, Wales” she whispers, and then pulls the chain tight and waits for the life to leak out of him. It doesn’t take long and when he slumps to the floor she takes his head in her hands and snaps his neck, just to be sure. 

She searches them for weapons, turns up a knife on Ange’s belt and a gun in Franz’s jacket. She takes them both, checking the gun for ammunition and tucking the knife into the waist of her catsuit. Her head is spinning and she’s running purely on adrenaline, moving on to the next thing and the next thing, knowing that if she stops to think even for a second, she’ll be overwhelmed.

She studies the lock for a moment, then pulls the knife back out, removing Franz’s index finger with one quick slice and holding it to the key pad whilst it’s still warm. She takes a strange satisfaction in knowing that the blood dried into her hands and clothes is no longer all hers.

The lock beeps. The door clicks. 

Natasha listens. All is quiet on the other side. She pushes the door open.

The corridor is deserted, but there’s a camera winking at her from a few yards away. She hurls her chain-and-padlock combo at it and there’s a smash of breaking glass and a crack as the blinking red light goes out. She waits for the shouts and pounding feet, for someone to have heard the noise or glimpsed her on a screen somewhere. It doesn’t come. She starts to pad silently down the corridor, passing cell after cell, each with its door unlocked and slightly ajar. Her breath hitches at each one she passes, scrutinising the shadows for movement behind the doors.

As she approaches the end of the corridor, she glimpses light reflecting off a window and a door which is a little less solid and unfriendly than those leading to the cells. A security room, she surmises. Most likely where the feed from the camera ends up. Its occupant is either not paying attention, or is waiting for her behind the door. She creeps up against the wall, braces herself to put all her weight on her injured foot and then kicks out the lock with her other leg. The door bursts open and she enters with her gun raised. 

There’s no-one there. 

Natasha studies the screens arrayed in front of her in confusion. They show snippets of an extensive facility, most of the rooms dark and uninhabited. She can’t count more than twenty people in a building designed for at least two hundred. She observes the layer of dust covering the screens and the desk, and the answer creeps up on her. This base wasn’t in use before they arrived. The only people here are those that escaped before she blew up their little Red Room experiment. She breathes a little easier. Getting what she needs and getting out of here alive suddenly seems a little more attainable.

She moves on, walking silently down corridor after corridor, straining to listen for voices ahead. She reaches a sleeping block, and pushes open door after door, gun going first. She needs access to their servers, and she needs it quickly. Might as well ask a local. 

The fourth room is occupied, its resident napping on top of the bedspread. It’s almost too easy. He wakes to find a gun at his temple, the Black Widow’s thighs pinning his arms to his sides. His eyes widen in fright. She knows she must look deranged, streaked with dried blood and barely decent.

She leans forward and hisses in his ear, “Tell me where I can find a computer terminal and I might let you live.”

He tells her, voice shaking. She’s almost disappointed in him. She doesn’t let him live. 

Blood gushes from his throat and soaks the bed. The gun would have been too loud.

Natasha grips the bannister as she staggers up the stairs, cursing as she leaves a bloody handprint behind. She’s mildly surprised to find an uninhabited open-plan office exactly where he said it would be. She operates the handle with her elbow, but slips and now there’s blood on the doorframe as well. _Shit._ She limps to the furthest corner of the room, leaving the lights off and using the glow of the full moon to search the desks until she finds a decent-sized flash drive. She sinks gratefully into a chair under a window, first testing the mechanism and checking it isn’t locked. She has a clear view of the door and an escape route if she needs one.

She boots up the computer and gets to work. 

Ange’s attentions with the knife in the palm of her right hand seems to have damaged a ligament or a muscle and her fingers won’t obey her properly. She growls in annoyance and types with her left. It’s frustratingly slow.

She hacks into the servers first, tapping away furiously until she finds what she needs, compiles it all into a folder and starts copying. The red ‘busy’ light on the drive starts to blink. Then she deploys a snippet of code which will wipe the servers once she’s done. 

She pauses a moment to listen, hears raised voices below. A door slams. They’ve found the body.

She types faster, forcing her way into the building management system, overriding the safety mechanisms on the boilers, and setting up a program which will cause them to explode under high pressure in about ten minutes. She studies the other systems she has access to. It’s not a lot, but a bit of creativity with the sprinkler systems should cause a fair amount of damage.

There are footsteps on the stairs. Someone’s spotted her handprint. She glances down at the flash drive. It’s not done copying yet. 

She works faster, hacking into their communications and sending an encrypted signal on a frequency known only to her and Clint. She sends emails to a secure account as well, but she has no idea which, if any, will get through. There’s banging and shouting along the corridor now. She knows it won’t be long before they find her blood on the doorframe.

The flash drive is still blinking: 75% complete. The screen is bathing her in cold blue light. She switches it off, grabs her gun in one hand and knife in the other, and ducks down behind the desk to wait. 

There’s a shout of triumph. The door slams open. She hears two pairs of boots enter the room, another two stopping outside the door. The lights come on. Two safeties click off. Natasha holds her breath, staring at the little blinking light and willing it to finish faster. She feels exposed, like a child hiding under the bed. Her finger itches on the trigger.

She watches the shadows on the wall as they stalk towards her, guns pausing to point under every empty desk. 

“Come out, come out wherever you are.” One of them calls tunelessly. He’s clearly read the same ‘100 clichéd lines for Hydra operatives’ manual as Franz.

Their shadows move closer.

_Three…._

Soldier number one reaches the penultimate row of desks.

_Two…_

Soldier number two joins him.

_One…_

She shoots one through the head, the other through the chest, the bangs reverberating around the room and shattering the quiet of the night. The guards outside storm in, peppering the desk with bullets. There’s more shouting and thundering footsteps on the stairs.

She ducks down again. The drive is _still_ fucking blinking. 

A shot to the head, and another goes down. But there are five more of them now, two covering as the others stalk towards her. She fires shot after shot. Two more go down. Her hand is starting to shake. Four are left.

Three shots fly true, three bodies crumple to the ground. The fourth is an empty click, followed by a burning pain in her hip as a bullet embeds itself in the wall behind her. She doesn’t have time to think about it. She drops to the floor again, discards the now useless gun. The last man standing is vaulting over the desks towards her.

She’s on eye level with the flash drive. It blinks one last time. _Finally._

Natasha grabs it and tucks it down the front of her catsuit. The remaining soldier has a clear shot, but he hasn’t taken it. He continues careering down the room towards her, his eyes lit up in cruel glee. He wants to make this personal. More fool him. 

She moves suddenly, rolling under the desk out of range and simultaneously flinging the knife still gripped in her right hand. A bullet tangles in her hair, but there’s a gargling noise and the last man collapses with a knife through his throat.

She takes a minute to breath, but there’s more clamouring downstairs and she’s out of weapons. She staggers to the window, wrenching it open and hauling herself onto the sill. 

She jumps. 

There’s not far to fall. She’s only on the second floor, but she misses the landing, her foot twisting awkwardly as she rolls, every part of her body taking its turn to impact the hard ground. She’s up again before she can think, bare feet on gravel, running towards the fence. She hasn’t got time to search it for weaknesses, so she scales it, only two of her four limbs doing anything close to what she tells them. She tries to vault over the barbed wire at the top, tries to twist gracefully and catapult herself over it, a move she’s completed a hundred times before. But her ribs protest and her abdomen gives up halfway through and she falls down the other side, barbed wire tearing a jagged line down her back.

But it doesn’t matter. She has what she came for. She’s out. As her run becomes a stagger she hears three deep explosions going off behind her. She glances back and sees the top floor of the building start to crumble, dust flying and debris clattering off the roof. It’s not enough, but it’s a distraction. 

Her stagger turns to a crawl and then she’s lying on her back in the damp grass, vision blurring and the steady throbbing pulse of blood fleeing her body from the bullet wound to her hip. She grasps at her stomach, searching for the flash drive. It’s still there, and no-one’s following her and, alive or dead, Clint will find her sooner or later and so it doesn’t really matter but she really, _really_ doesn’t want to die. With a gargantuan effort she clutches at a rip in her left sleeve, tearing the fabric away and wadding it up to hold against her hip. She forces herself to sit up, unwraps her foot and uses the strips of fabric to tie her makeshift compress tightly around her waist. It won’t last long, but maybe long enough. She collapses back against the grass.

The night is clear and the stars go on forever. Natasha breathes slowly, inhales and exhales, feels damp seep into her clothes and the breeze waft over her face and it’s freezing but also liberating. Her fingers weave into the grass, gripping onto something real and alive. No-one’s watching. No-one’s life depends on her retaining her control. She lets herself go a little, relaxes her iron grip on her emotions. Her mind drifts to the dull ache in her left arm. She stops herself again, pulls herself back. It’s not over yet. Now is not the time for grief.

She starts to shiver. She counts the stars to keep herself awake, names the constellations, maps the difference between this night-sky and her own. Up-state New York. Iowa. A spider crawls up her arm. She talks to it.

“I think I’ll call you Peter.”

  


***

  


_Ten minutes ago, Cwmduad, Carmarthenshire, Wales_

It’s been three days. Three days of searching and waiting and maddening inactivity. Added to that the spectre of twenty four now homeless children, who simultaneously are and aren’t Steve’s responsibility to worry about, and his nerves are close to breaking point. Clint had jumped on a plane after forty eight hours with no word, but it turns out that seven worried and frustrated Avengers are not much more use than six. Eventually, they’d all found things to do, ways to help out, by chopping mountains of vegetables, or taking out their tension on heaps of firewood. Anything that could be distracting. 

That’s why, when Tony and Clint’s radio equipment eventually starts bleeping, Steve’s the only one hanging around to hear it. He jumps slightly, whirling around to locate the source of the noise. One of the screens is flashing, an indecipherable signal bouncing up and down. His heart-rate doubles as he stares at it. He realises that he has no idea what to do. 

He sprints down the stairs, out of the backdoor and across a field, following the trail he saw Tony leave by earlier in the day. His heart is starting to pound, and he’s mentally kicking himself. _What if she’s waiting for a reply?_ He rounds a bend, and nearly runs into Tony and Rhodey dragging half a tree down the narrow path. He skids to a halt, but there’s no real need for him to explain. The desperate hope and relief are all in his eyes. 

“Romanoff?” Tony asks, as they’re already on their way back, Steve slowing his pace so the other men can keep up.

Steve nods, then pauses, “I mean honestly I have no idea but your kit started beeping and there was a signal coming through.”

They’ve made it back to the barn now, and Rhodey stops at the door, “You guys go on up, I’ll round up the others in case we need to leave.” They agree. It makes sense.

The attic room is silent when they burst up the stairs, and the screens are still. Steve’s heart stutters a little. “It’ll have been recorded, right?”

Tony’s already sat down, pulling out a keyboard and typing away. “What do you take me for?” He finishes typing with a flourish, and pulls the screen around with a grin.

_Come and join the party. I could use a lift._

_N._

_52.908949, 12.308549_

  


***

  


_Now, Neustadt, Germany_

“And that one, Peter, just above that tree… Can you see it? Seven stars making a ‘w’. That’s Cassiopeia.” Natasha’s voice is low, barely more than a murmur. She’s not entirely certain she’s speaking out loud. She’s not even sure she’s still awake. “She was Queen of Ethiopia. She tried to sacrifice her daughter to save her people. It didn’t go very well.” She searches for more. She’s sure she knew more, once. “There was a lady with snakes in her hair, and the god of the sea, but I can’t quite remember how it all fits together.” 

She closes her eyes, just for a second. It’s just a blink, really. A long one. “I’m not asleep, Peter, I’m just thinking about the next one. That one, just to the left, that’s….” She trails off, “That’s not a star.” A small smile spreads across her face, “I think that’s a Stark.” She chuckles slightly at her own joke; it feels like someone’s stabbing her in the side. She stops quickly. She thinks something about birds and planes and then decides that even Peter the spider must have heard that one before.

The yellow streak across the sky grows clearer and begins to resolve. The spider settled on her chest recognises that her attention is elsewhere and sets off scuttling down her other arm. She watches it until it disappears into the damp grass, feels suddenly bereft. “Thanks, Peter.”

She waits. The streak starts to burn itself into her irises, dimming the stars. She can’t see Cassiopeia any more. The red blob at the end gets larger. She can make out shapes, now, arms and legs and a head. The gentle whir of machinery and the rush of displaced air creep into the silence. Closer and closer.

She feels the soft thump as Tony lands beside her, hears the click as he opens his visor, “Nat, I think you and I need to have a serious talk about misuse of the word ‘party’.” 

She tries not to laugh with relief, “Space whales.”

“Good point.” The suit releases him, folding back in on itself in an intricate puzzle. It glistens in the moonlight, the movement like ripples on water. It’s really quite beautiful. She vaguely thinks she should sit up, acknowledge his presence in some way, but her body doesn’t really want to comply. 

“Sentry mode.” Tony mutters as he steps out onto the damp grass. It’s suddenly far, far too bright. Natasha squeezes her eyes shut as pain explodes behind their sockets. Tony’s breath catches. She hears him rapidly try to hide it.

“That bad, huh?” she mutters, and then a moment later, “Couldn’t you turn that thing down?”

She senses him crouch down in the grass beside her. “Sorry.” The light dims, and she feels two warm fingers pressing lightly against the side of her neck. She opens her eyes, tries to raise an eyebrow at him.

“Dead people don’t talk, Tony.”

“Just checking.” Her pulse is light, thready, too fast. She could have told him that. “What’s going to kill you first?”

The corner of her lips quirks, “Bullet grazed my left hip.” His eyes zero in on the wad of blood-soaked material pressed to her side and he grabs the medical kit from a compartment of his suit. She feels him gently peeling back the fabric. 

“Field surgery really isn’t my strong-suit.” He mutters, face intense with concentration, “Humans are too squishy.”

“Then you should appreciate the practice.” She winces as he cleans out the wound, her lips whitening in a thin line, fingers threading into the grass. After a few moments she squints at him: “Didn’t you retire old-man?”

He pretends to look affronted. “Good idea, Nat. Insult the man about to stab you with a needle.” His eyes narrow as he attempts to thread it. He makes it on the third attempt. “I thought we’d agreed it’s ‘active non-combatant’. No combat, see? Just two people in a lonely field and some amateur sewing.”

“Hmm.” She’s not convinced, never has been, but he’s saved any further interrogation as the needle enters and she hisses between her teeth.

They’re quiet for a few minutes. Natasha watches an owl circle overhead, hunting for prey. Tony’s tongue sticks out between his teeth like he’s doing something particularly finicky in the lab.

“Quinjet’s on its way, in case you were wondering. Steve, Clint, all the kids.”

“Clint?”

“Yuhuh. Laura kicked his arse onto a plane after day two.” He affirms as he threads the needle for the third stitch.

She rolls her eyes, “That was unnecessary.” He gives her a look. It says ‘people care about you and there ain’t nothing you can do about it’.

“You leave them any blowing up to do? I can’t help but think eight Avengers is going to be a little surplus to requirements.”

She shakes her head slightly. “Should sweep the building.” Her words are slow, a shallow breath between each sentence. “There were a few still alive. They’ve probably left by now.” She’s started shivering again, every shake causing her ribs to jostle agonisingly against each other.

He nods. “I’ll let them know.” He ties off the last stitch, and fixes gauze tightly over the wound. He speaks quietly into his comms for a second, then looks back at her. 

“What else?”

She blinks slowly, “Edited highlights?”

“If you must, but no leaving out anything life-threatening.” He wags a finger mockingly in her face, but his eyes are deadly serious.

She takes a deep breath, “Left foot fucked. Right hand’s a mess. Three broken ribs.” She pauses, frowns. She remembers barbed wire scraping down her back, thinks about having to turn over. It’s probably not deep. It’s probably fine. “Nothing more you can do right now.”

He raises an eyebrow at her sceptically.

“Cross my heart.” Her lip quirks in a familiar half-smile, “I have no intention of dying tonight.”

“Glad to hear it.” 

Tony packs up the supplies. A thought occurs to her. She reaches for the zip on the front of her catsuit, fumbling to tug it down with numb fingers. 

“Er, Nat, flattered as I am, I don’t think now’s the best time…”

She quells him with a look, rummaging around and pulling out the flash drive. She hands it to him. “What..?”

“It’ll tell you where they came from. Families. Homes.” 

His eyes widen in understanding, and he slips it carefully into his pocket. “Gotcha. I will guard it with my life.” The statement hangs in the air. They both try to ignore it. She’s shivering violently, lips starting to take on a blue tinge. Tony looks at his watch. “Quinjet should be here in ten minutes.” 

He thinks for a moment, then takes off his shoes, carefully transfers his socks to her feet. He’d like to give her his t-shirt, but he doesn’t want to move her. He pauses. “Nat, if I were, theoretically, to suggest sharing body heat, would you hit me?”

She shakes her head minutely, “I’m reckless, not suicidal.”

“Righty-o. I’m putting that on record.” He lies down awkwardly beside her, pressing as close as he dares. He takes both her hands between his own, tries to rub some warmth back into them. “You know, when I imagined this, it was under quite different circumstances. There were significantly fewer spiders.”

She laughs, and it turns into a wince, “Damnit Tony, that fucking hurts.” 

He grins, “I can’t help it sweetheart, my dazzling wit knows no bounds.”

“Now, I might hit you.”

He shakes his head against her shoulder, “I must refer you to the aforementioned record. No backsies.” 

Natasha groans, and she’s not sure if it’s annoyance or pain. Her fingers are starting to tingle, sharp little needles stabbing into their tips. She focuses on it, trying to keep herself present. She feels her eyelids drifting shut.

“Nat. No sleeping.” Tony’s voice is stern as he shakes her shoulder gently.

“Not sleeping…” She mumbles indignantly.

“Natasha Romanoff, open your eyes right now. Look at the stars.”

She grumbles, forcing them back open. They fill her vision, pinpricks in the blackness, blurring at the edges. She remembers something, another night under a clear sky. “You don’t like stars.”

“I don’t.” She feels him turn next to her, staring into the abyss. “Tell me about them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a surprising amount of fun writing Tony & Nat - I think I might try and do some more of them!


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “There?”
> 
> “Left.” 
> 
> “There?”
> 
> …
> 
> “Nat…?”
> 
> She grunts, “No. Up.”
> 
> “There.”
> 
> “Mm.”
> 
> “Cassiopeia, you said? Greek goddess, or something?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Warnings as per Chapter 1

_Now, Neustadt, Germany_

“There?”

“Left.” 

“There?”

…

“Nat…?”

She grunts, “No. Up.”

“There.”

“Mm.”

“Cassiopeia, you said? Greek goddess, or something?”

“Queen… Ethiopia.”

“Huh. Can’t really see it myself.” 

“…chair.”

“What, like a throne? Not very elaborate, is it?”

Natasha shakes her head slightly. She knows what he’s doing, is doing her best to play along, but she’s just so tired. Everything hurts and her vision is swimming and the ground is just so damn comfortable. Tony squeezes her shoulder gently, points westwards towards two bright specks which have appeared on the horizon. He grins, “Now that one, I do know. That one tells the story of six brave and dashing heroes on their way to defeat villainy and save a damsel in distress. How—ow!”

He stops abruptly and lets out a squeak of pain. Natasha has grabbed his little finger and given it a quick twist. Tony’s gratified to see a spark of mirth in her eyes. “For Christ’s sake you headcase, let go, I wasn’t finished.” 

She reluctantly releases him. 

“As I was saying. However, when they arrive they discover that the damsel was not, in fact, a damsel but a heroine herself, albeit one with volatile violent tendencies…” he looks pointedly at her, nursing his finger, “All the exploding and shooting is already done, the villainy is defeated, and all that remains is to get her home before she manages to kill herself. There, that better?” He turns back to look at her. Her eyes are closed. “Nat. Natasha.” 

Tony curses and shakes her again. No response. He sweeps her hair away from her neck, checks her pulse. It’s still there, weaker than before, and he can see her chest rising and falling slowly. “One more minute Nat. Couldn’t you have waited one more minute?” The quinjet is visible now, a dark blot against the darker sky. He watches as three distinctive streaks of light emerge from it and make a beeline for the silhouette of the crumbling facility at the top of the hill. The chatter in his comms unit starts up again as Rhodey, Vision and Sam co-ordinate a sweep of the building. He tunes it out.

“Tony, we’re on our way in.” Clint’s voice cuts across the chatter, “Do we have a clear landing?”

“I see you. And yep, nice big field.” He responds.

“How’s Nat?”

“Out. But still with us.” As the whir of the quinjet engines becomes audible, he squats, slipping his arms underneath her and preparing to lift. His hands slide against her back, slick with blood. His heart sinks. He closes his eyes in frustration, “Oh for _fucksake_ Nat. You promised.”

He lifts her into his arms as the quinjet touches down, snapping at his suit to follow. Natasha groans as they move, the world coalescing for a moment, familiar faces swimming into her line of sight. She feels callused fingers in hers. Raised voices. She squeezes Clint’s hand like a lifeline. The blackness claims her again.

Clint helps Tony set Natasha down on the cot in the quinjet. Steve slips into the pilot’s seat and readies the craft for take-off. Their movements are seamless, born of old habits and frequent experience, each one of them able to flit between field medic and pilot depending on circumstances and injured party. They’ve all passed out on that very bed before.

“We need to get her on to her front. Her back’s torn up. She’s still losing blood. She neglected to tell me.” Tony’s voice is snappish and sarcastic, a mask for his fear.

Clint nods, and they start to move in synchrony, a side a piece. 

“Stop. Let me.” 

Tony starts, looks at Wanda guiltily. He’d forgotten she was there. 

“You sure?” Clint looks at her intently.

“Yes, it’ll be gentler.” 

Tony nods, “She’s right.” They both step back to let Wanda work, watch her wreath Natasha’s prone body in red light. She lifts her six inches, turns her over, and sets her back down gently. It’s efficient, without theatre, over in a matter of seconds. 

Tony grabs the scissors, cuts the torn fabric away from her back. He feels slightly guilty as he snips through the back of her bra, but the time for modesty left them a long time ago. Wanda grabs a damp cloth and antiseptic, starts gently wiping away the blood and dirt, revealing livid bruising across most of her torso. Tony gratefully hands over his head field-medic status to Clint, handing him things as his deft fingers patch up her back, neat rows of steri-strips and stitches overlaying scars pulled together by his hands years before. Tony keeps two fingers against the side of her neck, just in case.

A sharp intake of breath breaks Clint’s concentration, and he glances at Wanda who has moved on with her cloth, over Natasha’s shoulders and down her left arm. Her face has paled and her hands are shaking. He shifts to see what she’s looking at, and feels his stomach drop out as he sees the livid six-legged skull burnt into her upper arm. _Tasha._

“Tony.” His voice is hard, “Is Helen Cho still operating?”

Tony looks up, “No I…” He trails off as he sees what they’re looking at. He sets his jaw, “She is now.”

Clint feels his mind reeling, impotent anger starting to burn in his stomach. But he wrenches his thoughts away. They’re no use right now. He ties off a final stitch, “That’s it. That’s all we can do now.” He brushes Natasha’s hair gently off her face, and sits down with her hand in his. This is far from the first time he’s been an inch from losing her, or her him, but it’s the first time they’ve not been back to back, each dragging the other forward as the bullets fly overhead. He grips her hand, willing her to hold on. He has found retirement simultaneously more wonderful and more difficult than he could have imagined. In his head, Natasha is family, she sits in the same cocoon as Laura, Cooper, Lila and Nate. Auntie Nat. An honorary Barton. He’d never considered that giving up his job could mean giving up his partner.

“She tell you what happened?” He aims the question at Tony, still standing at Natasha’s head, watching her lungs slowly expand and contract.

Tony shakes his head, “Had other things on my mind. Doesn’t take a genius to work it out though.” He gestures at the hand Clint’s holding, the lacerations around her wrist, “She didn’t just get into a fight.”

Wanda looks at him. Her eyes are dark with anger. “I think it was. I think it was all a fight.” 

Tony looks surprised, then acquiesces, “Yes, well, I don’t think Nat knows how not to fight.”

There’s a few moments of quiet, the only sound the hum of the engines and five heartbeats. Tony seems to be struggling with something. He moves up to the front of the aircraft, digging around in his pocket. When he finds what he’s after he puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, pulls out the flash-drive, a grim look on his face, “Nat gave me this. She said it has all their files on it.” 

There’s a certain weight behind his words. Steve blinks at him, “You don’t think…?”

Tony shakes his head, “I don’t know. I hope not. I hope it was just an opportunity.”

Steve swears quietly, glances back at Natasha. His fingers turn white on the wheel. He looks faintly sick. “I insisted there wasn’t time.”

Tony nods, grimly, “So did I.”

“If she… jesus. She wouldn’t let me help her. If I’d…”

Tony stops him, shakes his head, “She’s her own woman, Steve, you can’t take responsibility for this one.” He sighs, sits down in the co-pilot seat, “Trust me, I hate this as much as you, but…. If I’m right, she did what she felt she had to do. No-one else got hurt.”

Steve stares ahead, out into the night. A moment later, his fist collides with the dashboard. Protective glass shatters. “I’m still furious with her.”

Tony chuckles sourly, “Yup.”

There are bright lights on the horizon, the Isle of Wight and the south coast of England coming in to view below them. Steve takes a few deep breaths, then pages a message through to the safe-house. Tony calls back to the others, “We’re ten minutes out. Buckle up guys.”

Someone mumbles something indistinct. He sees Clint lean over towards Natasha and laugh. Wanda looks at him as if to say ‘I told you so’. He catches her eye, and nods.

  


***

  


_Twenty-four hours later, Cwnduad, Carmarthenshire, Wales_

Natasha sleeps and she dreams of Russia. She dreams of biting air and ice on the insides of windows. She dreams of the ache of cold steel in too small hands, the heat of a bullet. Men scatter in her path. Down they go, one by one. There’s a whisper in her ear. There’s always a whisper. She catches flies in her web but someone else is pulling her strings. She cuts them, one by one. Blood soaks her hands. Red everywhere. And then Franz is there, and she’s no longer holding a gun to someone else’s head, but feeling the icy weight of it to the back of her own. “That’s not how you were trained, Natalia.” The gun isn’t cold any more, and it’s not a gun. It’s hot, smouldering, burning through her. She screams, but it’s more than a scream. It’s anger, pure rage, a cord of it pouring out of her, no end in sight. 

She wakes.

Clint’s watching her, a book in his hands. 

“Hey.” She groans. Everything aches and her body feels tight and there are needles in her left arm. The sheets feel scratchy, the mattress too soft. 

“Hey yourself.”

“Was I…?” 

He nods, “but quietly.”

She closes her eyes, grateful for that, at least. They fly open a moment later, her hand reaching for him urgently, trying to sit up, “The files—” She squints, trying to remember through the haze, “Tony—“

He nods, “Maria’s on a mission. Figuratively. She’s got people working around the clock.” He pauses, watches her for a second, “First quinjet went back to Poland this morning, SHIELD psychiatrists and all. Still, home’s got to be better than here.”

Natasha lets out a breath, “We hope.”

“Can’t judge the world by the people in this room, Nat.” 

She shrugs in acknowledgement, her stomach and ribs complaining bitterly about the unnecessary exertion as she sinks back onto the bed. Recent memories are starting to emerge from the haze. She remembers the field, remembers Tony’s new found interest in the celestial. It stirs a funny sensation in her stomach that she’s not entirely comfortable with. 

Clint studies her for a moment, “Tony’s seriously pissed with you.”

Anyone else might read her expression as impassive, but Clint can see a slight sheepishness in the narrowing of her eyes, “Ah.” 

He smirks. She looks at him, “You’re not pissed with me?”

He laughs at her, “No. I wouldn’t have expected anything less.” 

Her lips quirk into a half-smile. She can’t help it. It’s so easy, this. She’s missed it. 

“Fuck, I hurt.”

“Yes, well, if you will get yourself beaten up for three days, that’s what happens.”

“It wasn’t meant to be three days.”

“You’re losing your touch.”

He has her hand in his now, holding tightly like he’s trying to hold her together. She shuts her eyes, presses her lips against each other. Her voice, when it comes out, is quiet, 

“Did you see it?”

“Yes.” He nods, “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

It’s a statement, not a question, but she answers anyway with a single shake of her head, “No.”

She reaches across clumsily with her right hand, tentatively fingers the bandage wrapped around her upper left arm. The pain lingers, deep and sharp and throbbing all at once. The grief is coming now. She can feel it. She swallows. They both speak at once.

“I don’t—“

“Tony’s trying—“

“I thought he was pissed with me.” Her voice is a little bitter, and it’s unfair and she doesn’t know where it came from but she’s got so much anger coiled up inside her, and the people who deserve it are dead and she’s deeply regretting killing them so quickly and it’s all starting to spill out at the seams.

Clint knows. “Tasha, he’s not that pissed.” She doesn’t say anything, but he can see it somehow, there’s a quick apology somewhere in the relaxing of her brow or the slight widening of her eyes, “He’s been talking to Helen Cho. There’s—“

“She doesn’t do that anymore.” She shuts him down.

“She might. She owes you.”

Natasha cocks her head, her face blank, scepticism in every line of her jaw, “How’d you work that out?”

“You prevented her being responsible for a lot of unnecessary deaths. I’d say that’s a pretty hefty wedge in the black.” She scoffs and rolls her eyes, starts to interrupt, but Clint stops her with a light hand on her arm, “I’d have been pretty thrilled if someone had done that for me.” 

She can’t keep hold of it then, it feels like the easy routine they’ve slipped back into has been knocked out of kilter and everything’s sliding off axis, “Clint, this is ridiculous. I can’t—“ she stops at the crack on the edge of her voice. Natasha doesn’t cry. It was beaten out of her too thoroughly when she was six years old and her body doesn’t work that way anymore. But this, this is about as close as she gets. She breathes. “Just stop.” 

She holds his gaze, willing him to understand that what’s going on in her head right now is not just any one thing, and it’s not about whether it can or cannot be fixed. She can hear the snap and crackle of flames barely covering the sound of screaming, a particular shade of orange is burnt into her retinas and there’s a smell that she’ll never be rid of. That’s what it took to destroy the Red Room, but it just keeps rising from the ashes; another power-crazed man moulding little girls into weapons which she has to stop. And every time it happens, it chips away at her sense of self, at who she is beyond what they made her to be. She loses a little of the agency she has managed to carve out for herself and has to claw it back. Clint knows this, he just…

“Sorry.” He looks contrite, “It’s been a while.” And it has, it’s been well over a month since Natasha’s managed to slip out to the farm, and that was only overnight, a frantic call from Steve in the early hours dragging her away well before she was ready to leave. They’re out of sync, their lives don’t match anymore and they have to make an effort to meet each other in the middle in a way they’ve never needed to before. 

She squeezes his hand, “Tell me about the kids.” There’s no question of which ones she’s talking about.

Clint can’t help the shadow of a soppy grin that reaches his face, “You sure? You know I won’t stop once I get started?”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” Her voice is still dry and quiet, but he can detect the hint of affection she reserves for three small souls.

“Nate’s just entered the ‘putting everything in his mouth stage’, and if you thought Lila was bad, you should see what he’s managed to sneak in there. It’s driving Laura wild. She couldn’t find her wedding ring last week, we scoured the house for it and there it was, in his mouth, 14 carat gold being used as a teething ring.” 

She raises an eyebrow, “He has expensive taste.”

“Well, what did we think was going to happen when we named him after you?” Clint shoots back with a wink, before diving into a detailed account of Lila’s latest baseball games. Natasha listens attentively, adding the odd sarcastic comment, but mostly letting his words wash through her uninterrupted. She needs this. She hadn’t realised how desperately. She needs to be reminded that normal kids play baseball and collect conkers and draw hopscotch on the pavement with chalk. That they cry when they fall down, and love fiercely and unconditionally and that the only monsters they’re afraid of live under the bed. 

It allows her to uncoil, to step back a little from the intensity of the last few days, to take out all of the things she’s locked away and not allowed herself to feel and start to put them back into their proper place. The rage is still there. But, if she’s really honest with herself, it far pre-dates Steve handing her a folder two weeks ago. 

She breathes deeply, feels out her body, reminding herself that it belongs to her. Clint watches her as he talks. He knows what she’s doing. Her thoughts are starting to unpack themselves, starting to get to a place where she can deal with them, one at a time. She waits for a pause in Clint’s tale, waits for him to leave her an opening.

She starts to talk.

Her voice is low, but steady, “I thought I was done. I burned them to the ground. I didn’t think something that twisted could happen twice.” She gives a sour little laugh that goes nowhere near her eyes, “More fool me.”

“Don’t, Tasha. It’s not your fault.”

She shakes her head, “This is my fight and I should have been better at it. We weren’t looking for this. We should have found it sooner.” 

“Nat—“

“Don’t, Clint.” She mirrors his words, “It’s not my fault but it’s my responsibility.”

“Only because you make it.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t respond immediately. There’s nothing to say. He knows what it is to take a cause into your soul, to fight for it tooth and nail because if you don’t, if you stop, then what’s been the point of your life? He watches a little of the tension leave her shoulders. He knows her. By saying the words, by hearing it out loud, she’s a step closer to the absolution she still feels she needs. 

She’s got the space to think about the other thing now.

“After everything—after everything I’ve done, I thought that was it. I thought there wasn’t any more violence I hadn’t experienced or perpetrated. I know what a bullet to the gut feels like, I know which bones crack when you stab a knife through someone’s shoulder. I know how it feels to be beaten and starved and—well.“ She shrugs, she’s circling around the point, getting closer and closer to falling in.

“Mostly, recently, I’ve gone into those situations intentionally. I know the risk, but I want or need something and it’s worth it because it’s all just pain and the scars show that I survived. I know how to deal with that.” She shrugs her left shoulder, bites her lip in a most un-Nat-like expression, “I don’t know how to deal with this.” 

Her voice is quiet, an admission of weakness that she immediately wants to choke back. 

Clint looks at her, “Neither do I. This isn’t something either of us were ever trained for.” He echoes her words from long ago, as she sat at his side on another hospital bed, and the world fell apart around their ears, “Talk to Tony, please. We’ll find something. You don’t have to do this alone.”

He catches a sudden change in her expression as her eyes focus in on something behind his head. He turns around to look through the window behind him. Three little girls are playing with a jump rope on the lawn. He turns back to her, “They’re going to be ok, Tasha.”

Her lips tighten, but then she looks into his eyes and remembers that he gets this. Or, not exactly this, but something like it. Her lip quirks, “What, like us?” 

He grins slowly, “Well, maybe not exactly like us.” 

  


***

  


_Two weeks later, Cwnduad, Carmarthenshire, Wales_

Wanda appears at the door, face flushed from running through the brisk outside air, “Nat?”

Natasha looks up from her laptop, her mind still a million miles away, wracking her exhausted brain for any new way to trace the Kuznetsov family from Novgorod. Or rather, to trace the right Kuznetsov family. She blinks at Wanda, who’s looking at her expectantly, “Come on, we need to go outside. There are bunny rabbits.” She says it like the logic is clear.

Natasha shakes her head, “Wanda, I can’t. I had enough of a fight to get them to let me sit in a chair, let alone go outside.”

Wanda raises an eyebrow, “Since when have you followed Doctor’s orders? We’re going outside.” She nods towards the laptop, “There are plenty of other people doing that.”

“Wanda, I need to see this through.” 

Wanda’s gaze bores into her, “There are other ways to see this through.” Natasha looks away first. 

The younger woman takes that as her cue to stride across the room, pulling open the tightly closed curtains. Sunlight streams in, and they both squint in the sudden brightness. “We need to go outside. It’s a beautiful day. There’s a bench, it’s not far. I found some crutches.” She presents them to Natasha, her expression brokering no argument. 

Natasha sighs, “Fine.” She closes down the laptop, shuts the lid with a snap. Wanda offers her an arm and helps her up. She’s attacked by a wave of dizziness, but blinks it away. 

“Ok?” 

“Yes, I’m fine.” 

“No, you are not.”

Natasha looks at Wanda in surprise, then smiles and shakes her head, takes the crutches and fumbles with one of them in her injured hand. They discard it, and Wanda takes her elbow instead. “Right. Bunny rabbits.”

They make slow progress past the bathroom down the hall, and then they’re in unchartered territory. The stone floor and white-washed walls open up into a large entryway, weak winter sunlight streaming in through the picture windows either side of a front door which nobody uses. They pass through into a cluttered kitchen, clean pans and breakfast crockery set to drain by the sink. Wanda opens the back door. Natasha stops.

“Hang on.” She gestures toward her feet, one encased in plaster-cast and the other in a borrowed sock, “I need at least one shoe. And perhaps a coat.”

The younger woman looks back at her thoughtfully. “I think you are right. I will be back.”

Natasha sinks gratefully into a chair to wait. Her body is itching to move, but complaining every time she does. It’s quite unfair. She lets her gaze drift through the glass panel in the back door. The sun is low and bright in a dazzlingly blue sky, casting long shadows and a purple hue over the fields. Wanda’s right, it is a beautiful day. It also, frankly, looks fucking freezing. She glances around the messy kitchen. The house is quiet, like it’s waiting for something. She knows Tony’s still around somewhere, also choosing to remain behind when the others left to man the fort back home. 

Wanda returns after a few minutes with a hiking boot, and two thick, weatherproof jackets. One is purple, the other lime green. Natasha takes the lime green one, just to be contrary. They both pull them on, and Wanda helps her lace up the boot, pulling on her own shoes before offering her elbow again. Natasha takes in her reflection in the glass panels of the back door; she looks ridiculous, and the thought somehow makes her smile.

They make their way outside, following a path through the adjoining field towards a small copse of bare trees. Natasha experiments with putting weight on her injured foot. It aches, but it doesn’t feel like a bad ache. She looks across at Wanda, takes in their horribly clashing outerwear, “If only the tabloids could see us now…”

Wanda lets out a small chuckle, “Let’s not tell them. I think that would ruin our reputation.” She looks contemplative for a moment, “Although, lime green and red hair is not as bad as you might think.”

Natasha just raises an eyebrow at her, and shakes he head. “Didn’t you say something about bunny rabbits?”

Wanda shrugs one shoulder, “They’re around. You have to sit and wait.” They round the corner then, and through the trees Natasha catches a glimpse of colour and movement in the field on the other side. She feels herself stiffen.

“Wanda…”

“Hm?”

“Who else is here?” But she knew from the beginning that Wanda wasn’t dragging her out to observe the local fauna. 

Wanda just looks at her, “Come on.”

She mentally shakes herself, because this is ridiculous and cowardly and that’s one thing that Natasha will never allow herself to be. But she can’t rid herself of the fact that two little girls whose families she can’t seem to find instil a paralysing terror in her which is quite out of proportion. She can’t bring herself to move. Wanda steps in front of her, “Nat?” Her expression is unreadable, “What are you so afraid of?”

Natasha doesn’t reply immediately, her eyes sliding to a point just to the right of the other woman’s head. Past the trees, she can see for miles, the fields growing wilder and wilder until they vanish into a mass of greens and yellows and browns sinking over the horizon. She looks back at Wanda, “I don’t want to look at them and see myself.”

Wanda doesn’t reply, doesn’t deny or reassure. She just takes her hand, “Come on.”

They round the trees slowly, a weather-beaten wooden bench sliding into view as promised. Natasha hears laughter first, and a Russian skipping song she barely knows the words to. 

“Hi there.” A blonde woman holding one end of the rope waves at them with her free hand, and Wanda waves back familiarly. Natasha vaguely recognises her from her years at SHIELD. Mary, she thinks. They’ve crossed paths on a difficult mission involving children before. 

She takes a seat on the bench, looks up at the vast expanse of the sky overhead. It’s the clear, bright blue of a dry winter’s day and its vastness is all-encompassing. Wanda has pulled a ball of yarn and a half knitted sock out of her pocket, and the repetitive movement of her fingers is mildly hypnotic. Natasha closes her eyes and lets it envelop her, listens to the words of her mother-tongue even if she can’t bring herself to watch. At some point, she becomes aware of the song reaching its end, and then feels an unfamiliar hand on her knee. Her eyes fly open.

“Hi.”

The girl is about seven years old, bundled up in a blue duffle coat with flyway mousey hair pulled back in a ponytail under a daft green bobble hat. Her face is flushed with exertion, eyes bright. She looks like Lila. 

“Hi.”

“I’m Yana. And my little sister’s Sofia. What’s your name?” Her English is almost flawless, only a slight lilt in the vowels betraying her homeland.

Natasha thinks for a moment before responding, slipping into her mother tongue because she can’t bear to remember what that costs, “Natalia. But my friend’s call me Natasha.” 

The girl grins at the sound of the diminutive, switching to Russian, “Can I call you Natasha?”

She smiles, “Sure you can.”

Mary walks over to join them, giving Natasha a sort of apologetic half-shrug half-smile. Yana continues to chatter, “Can you come and play? Sofia’s too little to hold the rope and I want a go.” 

She hesitates, but only for a moment, “Sure.”

She feels Wanda shift next to her, “You need a hand?”

Natasha shakes her head slowly, “No, I think I’m ok.”

She rises to her feet, picking up the crutch from where she’s left it leaning on the arm of the bench. A small, woollen-gloved hand reaches for her own. She tries to hide the wince as Yana tugs her forward. The little girl’s eyes widen, “Are you hurt?”

She grimaces, “Just a little bit.”

Yana seems to deliberate something. She looks at up at her carefully, “Mary says it’s ok to cry when you’re hurt.”

Natasha nods, her lips pressed tightly together, searching frantically for something to steer this conversation in a new direction. One that won’t make her blood run cold and her heart pound in her chest. She doesn’t really think through what she says. “I’ve never used a jump rope before. You’ll have to show me how.”

If Yana’s eyes were wide before, they now become saucers, “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“You should go first then. It was my turn, but if you’ve never had a turn, then it must be yours now.”

Oh, crap. Natasha glances pleadingly back at Wanda, but she is deliberately ignoring them, engrossed in picking up a dropped stitch. Natasha can tell she’s smirking. “I don’t know Yana, maybe you should show me how it’s done first.”

“It’s easy. You just have to run and jump and not be scared. I bet you can do it.”

“Yana…” Natasha stops herself in the middle of elaborating an excuse that a seven year old will understand. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Natalia never learnt to skip after all.

“Ok, hang on.” She jumps experimentally, causing the girl to giggle in surprise. Her ribs ache, but it’s not pain, not as such, not the bad sort that’s your body screaming at you to stop. She can take enough weight on her leg that it’s certainly not impossible. And, she thinks, if she does manage to injure herself using a jump rope, it’ll give Tony something to rib her about for the next six months. That should keep him happy. 

She nods, “Ok, I’ll give it a go.”

Yana grins, “You stand here and me and Mary will do the rope. It’s kind of scary when you’re waiting, because you think there’s no way you’ll be able to get in without getting all tangled up. But it’s always fine” She pulls Natasha down towards her and continues conspiratorially, “Sometimes I shut my eyes, and then it feels like flying.”

Natasha smiles. That, she can relate to. "Got it.”

She puts the yellow sun at her back, and feels a gentle breeze whistling through her hair. Wanda’s watching her again, and she has a childish urge to stick her tongue out at her. The brightly-coloured rope starts to turn between them, beating out a steady rhythm in time with her heartbeat. Yana picks up the song.

Natasha closes her eyes and takes the leap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Detailed content warning, as promised: This fic contains graphic violence, including drowning, branding and physical abuse. It contains references to child abuse in the Red Room in a vague and generally non-explicit way which references MCU-canon including Agent Carter. There are also the vaguest of vague references to Clint having had an abusive childhood. This fic does not contain any reference to non-consensual sex or sexual violence._


End file.
